I love books about farming, gardening, growing food and creating lasting bonds so no wonder I was drawn to this book.
Having recently enjoyed Susan JubI love books about farming, gardening, growing food and creating lasting bonds so no wonder I was drawn to this book.
Having recently enjoyed Susan Juby’s latest:The Woefield Poultry CollectiveI was hungry for more farming lore. Juby’s book is delightful and funny, a great entertaining read, but it is just playing farm. Now Kristin Kimball is the real thing. This wonderful writer is also a very serious farmer who together with her husband established and runs the Essex Farm.
Kristin Kimball's book came to me viaYour Food Your Choiceconference so I am lucky to have heard her speak about her life and her book. Once I got back home from this incredibly inspiring event, I have moved all my other books to the side and started reading. It's not for the faint of heart, full of graphic details of farm life in its entire glory, and it is an amazing and engaging read. It's a story of going back to land in times of economic upheaval, it is about going back to the roots literally and figuratively, it's about unhinged New Yorker becoming deeply committed to the ethics of hard work and growing good food as well as building community.
There are many many beautiful mindful moments in the course of the story such as milking the cows, making syrup from the sugar bush, working the land with the horses, weeding, harvesting food, cooking it, Kristin and Mark's wedding on the farm, and many more.
The chapter on milking and milk is not to be missed. It transported me directly to my childhood years in the sixties and seventies when I, a big city girl, had access to farms, cows, chicken and such during my summers spent mostly in the countryside. When Kristin talks about the taste of sour milk straight from the cow, I know exactly what she means, I can close my eyes and just like Proust reminiscencing about the taste of madeleines I can go back in time and savour the taste of cool sour milk drunk directly from clay bowls that stood on the shady parapets of the farmhouse window.
I remember being warned when I left Poland in the eighties: "watch out for their food in the West, it's all artificial and has no taste."
Growing good food, delivering it "two steps away from dirt", cooking it and eating with other people, we seemed to have forgotten that it is so essential to life and happiness, especially here in the North America but we are slowly forgetting it everywhere else as well. No wonder UNESCO declared French cuisine 'world intangible heritage’. Now we all need to rediscover this heritage because it's not exclusively French possession they just had been wisely holding on to it on every corner of their streets.
The Prague Cemetery move aside, here comes The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.
This super interesting, well written book made me put all my other reaThe Prague Cemetery move aside, here comes The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.
This super interesting, well written book made me put all my other reading aside and embark on a non-stop marathon of reading until I reached the very end of the story.
I like how the author left no stone unturned and explored the whole of the story not missing any of the tributaries that contributed to Henrietta Lacks’s universe.
I like how she made room for all the different voices and let them speak unhindered and tell their individual stories without superimposing herself on top.
I like it how whenever she came upon a new character or a new fact, she paused the main story and offered a very thorough explanation, including all the details and all the flavours. To the reviewer of The Guardian I say yes, the sandwich eating episode is absolutely necessary to make the story as vivid and as palpable as it is.
I like that she wrote economically and clearly, creating an engaging, suspenseful and compelling narrative that is almost too overwhelming and yet it is not too long.
I like how the author’s compassion shines through and makes the reader stop and reflect on the treatment of human beings by doctors and scientists.
I like how she not only informs but is whole-heartedly dedicated to the real person of Henrietta Lacks and to her large family.
I like how she made room for all the feelings and emotions experienced by Henrietta’s family members, especially Henrietta’s daughter Deborah and she refrained from exploiting them and offered her friendships to all of them.
I like how the author acknowledged and included all her sources and offered thanks to the not so small army of people who supported her throughout the process of creating the book. In fact hers is the longest running acknowledgement I have ever seen in a book. I love it.
Finally I like the fact that the author created The Henrietta Lacks Foundation, a non-profit organization and donated a portion of her book’s proceeds to it in order to help Henrietta’s descendants and others in their education.
Thank you Rebecca Skloot for writing this very important, informative, compassionate, insightful, vivid and suspenseful narrative and thank you for creating a very tangible good out of this heartbreaking story....more
I don’t know how I came upon this book. It has found its way into my Kobo reader. I borrowed the epub version of it from my library via the website. TI don’t know how I came upon this book. It has found its way into my Kobo reader. I borrowed the epub version of it from my library via the website. Thank goodness it has been brought back into printing. Upon reading it I immediately became fascinated by it and by its author. I knew nothing about Masanobu Fukuoka, who lived to be 95 (died on16 August 2008) and was a Japanese scientist, philosopher, and a farmer and developed a very unique way of farming, and also influenced many people in farming and at large.
He called his farming method Do-Nothing Farming. Don’t be deceived by the name, this farming does involve a lot of work, but of entirely different nature than regular, modern farming as we know it in the western world. Do-Nothing or Natural Farming grew out of close observation of nature and experimenting on fields and orchards over many years.
Early on Masanobu Fukuoka who was trained as a scientist specializing in plant pathology came to the conclusion that humans know nothing and nature knows everything. He followed this conclusion by dedicating his life to farming with nature, in a natural way. I love how he described how one day he needed to get away and travelled randomly through the countryside. He got on a bus and seeing a place named “Utopia”, got off. One can say that all his life was dedicated to Utopia.
Masanobu Fukuoka said himself that following the principles of natural farming requires a different state of mind that the modern humans possess. His farming is far from doing nothing farming, on the contrary it involves a very intricate and precise methods of sowing and growing crops. His farming shares some principles of perma culture such as “observe and interact”, “use small and slow solutions” but it does not involve plowing of fields. Neither does it involve using of fertilizers or chemicals. He followed certain principles that he outlined in his book that included: no cultivation, no chemical or any other fertilizers or composts, no weeding by tillage or herbicides. He was of opinion that those practises drain soil and deplete land. He used straw that he scattered over the harvested crops to protects newly planted seeds (among the old crops while they were still growing) and to prevent too many weeds. He maintained that nature, left alone, is in perfect balance. The insects and plant diseases are always present, but do not occure to the extent that chemicals are required if all is maintained in balance.
It struck me how those views mirror the current, more enlightened views on human health and disease, how maintaining healthy immune system through eating properly and living in a balanced way in all aspects of one’s life, effectively prevents diseases because if we help our bodies to be healty, they will be healthy.
One of the techniques Fukuoka used was sowing seeds sealed in clay pellets, among previous crops. It involved sowing seeds before the previous crops were harvested and applying straw to protect new seeds after the harvest. In those fields the soil rebuilt itself, weeds grew with the crops, but a certain delicate balance was maintained to the benefit of everybody.
Masanobu Fukuoka maintained that there is enough resilience in nature to keep harmony among plants, insects, animals. It seems that the most destructive force that meddles with nature, fights it - is a human.
In Masanobu Fukuoka’s fields a shift had happened from fighting nature to collaborating with nature.
I was fascinated by how this author-farmer looked at nature, and saw the beauty of it.
He wrote about how nature surprised him on occasions. How for example one day someone rushed to his house asking if he covered the fields with silver netting. It turned out that the beautiful effect was created by millions of spiders the weaved webs over harvested rice stubble. It only lasted one or two days and the webs were blown away. One of the secrets of Masanobu Fukuoka was that he was always ready to SEE nature and appreciated the amazing natural drama it created.
I am sure many are equally fascinated by Masanobu Fukuoka writing. I learnt that his books sold millions of copies in cities in Japan and in many countries. M. Fukuoka teaches a different way of looking at life that goes way beyond farming.
Not all can replicate Masanobu Fukuoka results in farming or in life.
One may say that his is a call to working with nature and not fighting her. And that this is the only way to achieve harmonious results.
It is said that at the end of his life he said that it was all useless, that his books were useless. He knew that until the human beings were prepared to learn the thought of cooperation that underlies everything, no matter what one says and does is of consequence. Perhaps his work of sowing seeds both literally in different soils and metaphorically in human souls was not useless but very important indeed. I think that many are prepared to hear the message nowadays....more
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