The Art Of Eating–M.F.K. Fisher

Just read an article on Slate about the extravagant cost of most recipes you’ll find online and in newer cookbooks.  The article references one of my all-time favorite tomes from one of my all-time favorite authors: M.F.K. Fisher’s The Art of Eating.
I first encountered this volume, which is a collection of five books between two [...]

A Gardener’s Guide to Plant Names–B.J. Healey

If you are both a gardener/farmer and a lover of history and of language (that’s philologist, for the initiated), this book is the ultimate in gratifying geekery.  The title page offers this summation of the book’s contents:
“An excursion into the mysteries of botanical names; and, I hope, an answer to your friends who fix you [...]

Impacts of Energy Uncertainties on the Food System in the Upper Midwest–Joseph Stinchfield

I’m going to take this opportunity, in my second book discussion of this blog, to geek out a little. Last week, my partner brought this report which he helped to create, and which has survived a house fire, storage in an old rabbit barn, and other travails of time, and gave it to me [...]

The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry

Being an English teacher, I thought I should occasionally post on books that rocked (or are currently rocking) my world. So, today I’m inaugurating a new category: BOOKS.
This collection of essays brings me deeper and deeper into an interconnected consciousness. Sometimes, when I resurface from one of Berry’s essays, I realize that my [...]