Reading Memoirs

I really enjoy reading memoirs about farming, cooking and gardening. Any memoir that involves food really, whether it's being grown or eaten. The Dirty Life by Kristin Kimball may be among my top ten favorite memoirs if I bothered to rank them. The book is about her rather extreme life change from a city dwelling writer to a rural farmer. I identified with her desire to find more of a connection to the land, a different purpose for her life but lacking the background to get her there. The other thing that I found fascinating was that her and her husband were successfully providing a well-rounded diet for themselves and the people in their community. They provide protein - beef, chicken, pork, eggs and milk, maple syrup, herbs, fruits, dried beans, grains and flours, and last but not least - a wide variety of vegetables. They are largely self-sufficient and do most of their work with draft horses and other non-mechanized methods. This idea is still completely over whelming to me, and yet I still long to live more like them. For me however, I believe that a localized lifestyle will mostly be provided by the hard work of other farmers. One thing that is clear from Kristin's book is that farming in this manner requires that you give yourself over to it completely and that it would be a lot harder without a spouse who is wholly on board. 

I know most if not all farmers balk at the idea of farming being a peaceful life. I know that it is not peaceful in a physical sense, ie: that you get to lay outside in beautiful pasture looking up at the sky, gently chewing on a piece of straw while trying to make out shapes in the fluffy white clouds as the cattle lazily graze around you. The feeling of peace that I feel, the envy that I feel when I think about farming comes from that sense of security you have with not only knowing exactly where the food came from, but from being able to go out and pick whatever fruit or vegetable it is that you wish to eat from your own property. And outside of the growing season, I imagine that you have a root cellar and pantry full of the food you spent all spring, summer and fall growing, harvesting and preserving. As a farmer, you can sleep soundly after a hard days work knowing that you can feed yourself and potentially a whole community of people. There will be no blizzards, road blocks or broken down cars that might keep you from getting to your own pantry. That being said I realize that a full pantry and root cellar comes with aching joints, blood, sweat and tears and then there is the devastating heartache that would come from crop failures. My naive belief is that on a diversified farm where there is loss, there would also hopefully be production because you didn't put all your eggs in one basket.  

I know I'm happiest when I can run out to the garden and pick what I need for dinner. What I prepare usually smells and tastes better because I had to work for it. Opening a package of thawing garden tomato puree in the middle of January is downright exciting. I can't imagine what it would feel like to know that someone else is experiencing a delicious, fresh and healthy meal because of the work that you did.

Here is a link to Kristin Kimball's web page.
http://www.kristinkimball.com/