It S A Long Road To A Tomato

Now updated and expanded, a New York executive-turned-farmer shares his story and the hows & whys of running a small organic farm in 21st century America. Keith Stewart, already in his early forties and discontent with New York’s corporate grind, moved upstate and started a one-man organic farm in 1986. Today, having surmounted the seemingly endless challenges to succeeding as an organic farmer, Keith employs seven to eight seasonal interns and provides 100 varieties of fresh produce to the shoppers and chefs who flock twice weekly, May to December, to his stand at Union Square Greenmarket in Manhattan—the only place where his produce is sold. It’s a Long Road to a Tomato opens a window into the world of Keith’s Farm, with essays on Keith’s development as a farmer, the nuts and bolts of organic farming for an urban market, farm animals domestic and wild, and the political, social, and environmental issues relevant to agriculture today—and their impact on all of us. Includes a foreword by Deborah Madison and gorgeous new woodcuts by Flavia Bacarella Praise for It’s a Long Road to Tomato “Keith Stewart opens this engaging book by transforming himself abruptly from midlife executive into novice organic farmer. The twenty years that follow on an upstate New York farm are sampled here in true-life tales that—without denying the sometimes harsh realities of the small producer’s life—leave the reader in no doubt of the joys that keep this small farmer on the land.” —Joan Dye Gussow, author of This Organic Life “An enduring pleasure to read.” —Sally Schneider, author of A New Way to Cook “Stewart has been providing New Yorkers with magnificent vegetables for two decades. Now, as if to prove he can do anything, he provides all Americans with a compelling story about his own approach to farming. And at precisely the right moment, just as millions of people across the country are rediscovering the pleasure, and the importance, of eating close to home.” —Bill McKibben, author of Wandering Home and Falter

An essential tool for assisting leisure readers interested in topics surrounding food, this unique book contains annotations and read-alikes for hundreds of nonfiction titles about the joys of comestibles and cooking. Food Lit: A Reader's Guide to Epicurean Nonfiction provides a much-needed resource for librarians assisting adult readers interested in the topic of food—a group that is continuing to grow rapidly. Containing annotations of hundreds of nonfiction titles about food that are arranged into genre and subject interest categories for easy reference, the book addresses a diversity of reading experiences by covering everything from foodie memoirs and histories of food to extreme cuisine and food exposés. Author Melissa Stoeger has organized and described hundreds of nonfiction titles centered on the themes of food and eating, including life stories, history, science, and investigative nonfiction. The work emphasizes titles published in the past decade without overlooking significant benchmark and classic titles. It also provides lists of suggested read-alikes for those titles, and includes several helpful appendices of fiction titles featuring food, food magazines, and food blogs.

2012 IACP Award Winner in the Food Matters category Supermarket produce sections bulging with a year-round supply of perfectly round, bright red-orange tomatoes have become all but a national birthright. But in Tomatoland, which is based on his James Beard Award-winning article, "The Price of Tomatoes," investigative food journalist Barry Estabrook reveals the huge human and environmental cost of the $5 billion fresh tomato industry. Fields are sprayed with more than one hundred different herbicides and pesticides. Tomatoes are picked hard and green and artificially gassed until their skins acquire a marketable hue. Modern plant breeding has tripled yields, but has also produced fruits with dramatically reduced amounts of calcium, vitamin A, and vitamin C, and tomatoes that have fourteen times more sodium than the tomatoes our parents enjoyed. The relentless drive for low costs has fostered a thriving modern-day slave trade in the United States. How have we come to this point? Estabrook traces the supermarket tomato from its birthplace in the deserts of Peru to the impoverished town of Immokalee, Florida, a.k.a. the tomato capital of the United States. He visits the laboratories of seedsmen trying to develop varieties that can withstand the rigors of agribusiness and still taste like a garden tomato, and then moves on to commercial growers who operate on tens of thousands of acres, and eventually to a hillside field in Pennsylvania, where he meets an obsessed farmer who produces delectable tomatoes for the nation's top restaurants. Throughout Tomatoland, Estabrook presents a who's who cast of characters in the tomato industry: the avuncular octogenarian whose conglomerate grows one out of every eight tomatoes eaten in the United States; the ex-Marine who heads the group that dictates the size, color, and shape of every tomato shipped out of Florida; the U.S. attorney who has doggedly prosecuted human traffickers for the past decade; and the Guatemalan peasant who came north to earn money for his parents' medical bills and found himself enslaved for two years. Tomatoland reads like a suspenseful whodunit as well as an expose of today's agribusiness systems and the price we pay as a society when we take taste and thought out of our food purchases.

Wouldn't you like to escape the hectic pace of modern life and enjoy a worry-free, self-reliant lifestyle? A lifestyle where your family shares lasting memories of living self-sufficiently instead of being slaves to digital devices and traffic jams. Whether you hope to move to the country or simply stay closer to the city, this book will show you: - How to create streams of self-sufficient and passive income wherever you are - That you can live a vibrant, healthy lifestyle and take care of yourself and your family - How you can get out of debt just as others did on their path to self-sufficiency - The 23 Critical Questions to ask before buying rural property - That you can insulate yourself from financial collapse and SHTF doomsday scenarios - How to retire happy and use homesteading as the NEW retirement plan Featuring profiles of 18 homesteaders and farmers who share intimate stories of their own journeys toward a healthier, freer, more fulfilling lifestyle, this book provides actionable ideas that you can use to achieve your dream of self-sufficiency. From how others got out of debt, to what to consider before buying land, to the critical steps to take when setting up a sustainable homestead or farmstead business, this book details the strategies that will save you money, generate income and put you on the path to self-sufficiency. Read How to Make Money Homesteading TODAY!

From country ham to coppa, bacon to bresaola Prosciutto. Andouille. Country ham. The extraordinary rise in popularity of cured meats in recent years often overlooks the fact that the ancient practice of meat preservation through the use of salt, time, and smoke began as a survival technique. All over the world, various cultures developed ways to extend the viability of the hunt--and later the harvest--according to their unique climates and environments, resulting in the astonishing diversity of preserved meats that we celebrate and enjoy today everywhere from corner delis to white-tablecloth restaurants. In Salted and Cured, author Jeffrey P. Roberts traces the origins of today's American charcuterie, salumi, and other delights, and connects them to a current renaissance that begins to rival those of artisan cheese and craft beer. In doing so, Roberts highlights the incredible stories of immigrant butchers, breeders, chefs, entrepreneurs, and other craftspeople who withstood the modern era's push for bland, industrial food to produce not only delicious but culturally significant cured meats. By rejecting the industry-led push for "the other white meat" and reinvigorating the breeding and production of heritage hog breeds while finding novel ways to utilize the entire animal--snout to tail--today's charcutiers and salumieri not only produce everything from country ham to violino di capra but create more sustainable businesses for farmers and chefs. Weaving together agriculture, animal welfare and health, food safety and science, economics, history, a deep sense of place, and amazing preserved foods, Salted and Cured is a literary feast, a celebration of both innovation and time-honored knowledge, and an expertly guided tour of America's culinary treasures, both old and new.

In 1947, when J. I. Rodale, editor of Organic Gardening, declared, "the Revolution has begun," a mere 60,000 readers and a ragtag army of followers rallied to the cause, touting the benefits of food grown with all-natural humus. More than a half century later, organic farming is part of a multi-billion-dollar industry, spreading from the family farm to agricultural conglomerates, and from the supermarket to the farmer's market to the dinner tables of families all across America. In the organic zeitgeist the adage "you are what you eat" truly applies, and this book reveals what the dynamics of organic culture tells us about who we are. Rodale's goal was to improve individuals and the world. American Organics shows how the organic movement has been more successful in the former than the latter, while preserving connections to environmentalism, agrarianism, and nutritional dogma. With the unbiased eye of a cultural historian, Robin O'Sullivan traces the movement from agricultural pioneers in the 1940s to hippies in the 1960s to consumer activists today—from a counter cultural moment to a mainstream concern, with advocates in highbrow culinary circles, agri-business, and mom-and-pop grocery stores. Her approach is holistic, examining intersections of farmers, gardeners, consumers, government regulations, food shipping venues, advertisements, books, grassroots groups, and mega-industries involved in all echelons of the organic food movement. In American Organic we see how organic growing and consumption has been everything from a practical decision, lifestyle choice, and status marker to a political deed, subversive effort, and social philosophy—and how organic production and consumption are entrenched in the lives of all Americans, whether they eat organic food or not.

Here is the story of a boy growing up in Germany prior to the Second World War that describes family life, schooling, and time in the military. Horst Baier became part of the German military, first as a youthful Brown Shirt and in 1942, when he was conscripted. His life in the German army is colorfully described, including the training. The long journey to the Russian front and the fighting there eventually led to his hospitalization and his chance meeting of a girl who would eventually become his wife. He was captured in Italy and became a prisoner of war in Egypt. Horsts marriage, travel to Canada, and eventually employment with the Ford Motor Co. in the United States of America and citizenship makes a happy ending.

A girl-child grows up and out of The Great Depression. Where to begin this story? Almost any place would do, but people like real beginnings and endings, so the year 1929 is as good a place as any. That was the year that a little girl's love affair with animals began. The child, almost by osmosis, soaked up values, ideals, concepts, and a philosophy of life, along with an ability to observe, understand, respect, and sometimes love every living thing. And, just as her father showed her that each duck had a distinct, individual personality, reasoning power, and the ability to communicate with anyone who understands 'duckese', he also taught her about death and its necessity if life is to continue. This is a difficult lesson for anyone, but a lesson everyone must eventually learn and come to terms with, no matter how hard and hurting they find it. Life is not only full of beginnings; it is also full of endings.