REVIEW: Ben Hewitt's HOME GROWN

This isn't so much a traditional "How To" parenting book as it is a series of interconnected personal essays about childhood, school, and learning throughout various points of the author's life. But in these essays, Hewitt lays out the basic case against the traditional education system, and why his family homeschools.

"...the more freedom and autonomy I allow my children to follow their passions and to learn on their own terms, the more passionate and eager to learn they become. The more engaged they become. And, inasmuch as I grant myself the same freedom and autonomy, the more engaged I become. The more I learn."

Hewitt writes beautifully about his family, their farm, and all the things he has learned while enabling his children to learn. I adore this book, and my copy is filled with underlined passages and scribbled annotations.

"What if the point of an education is to imbue our children with a sense of their connectivity, not merely with other humans, but also with the trees and animals and soil and moon and sky? What if the point of life is to feel these connections, and all the emotion they give rise to? What then?"

Although I do not agree with everything Hewitt writes (and who would agree with everything someone else thinks?), the spirit of giving his children the tools and opportunity to live and learn for themselves is what I strive for in my very own children.

"We shortchange our children's sense of responsibility and confidence by 'protecting' them from the tools and activities that build these very qualities. To learn how not to bend nails, they had to bend some. To learn how not to pull up beets, they had to pull some."

Even if you don't live on a farm, or even if you prefer traditional learning systems, this is a great book for thinking about how much responsibility and freedom we afford our children.  Could not possibly recommend this book higher.

HOME GROWN by Ben Hewitt. 2014 Roost Books

Ben Hewitt also writes beautifully about farm life on his blog.

REVIEW: The Third Plate by Dan Barber

I haven't felt compelled to properly review a book in some time, but I had a strong reaction to Dan Barber's The Third Plate. On one hand, Barber has written an entertaining and compelling book about his imitable farm-to-table restaurants and the farmers with whom they partner.  But on the other hand, his book represents a world that is completely foreign to the one in which I live. I found large swaths of his book to be un-relatable at best and off-putting at worst. A lot of books have similar problems, but the problems in this book demonstrate just how far apart the cutting edge of the sustainable food movement is from the diets' of many Americans.

The point Barber makes throughout is that is that eaters and consumers need to look past local, organic, or sustainable.  Those movements are not enough unless we begin to eat everything that grows on farm and completely flip what is expected in a meal.  Risotto made out of traditional cover crops like rye, plankton sauce, and carrot steaks are just a few of the novel ideas Barber employs at his restaurants.  This is all admirable, but he assumes the local and sustainable food battles are already won, but here in the rural midwest, what he takes for granted is seen as naive at best and heretical at worst.

Even when Barber is championing a worthy cause like the elevation of lesser cuts of meat in haute cuisine, he seems completely detached from the meals most Americans are eating outside his five-star restaurants.  For all of its faults, the one thing the industrial food system does well is make use of lesser cuts of meats.  It's not like those chicken nuggets and compressed deli slices are the choices cuts.  Barber's aristocratic tone is not helped by the considerable amount of space he allots to foie gras, and his championing of celebrity chefs as the gatekeepers for sustainability in a very top-down model.  Five-star chefs have their place in the food movement along with farmers, writers, filmmakers and other. But anyone who claims that something as complicated as a social movement works in a linear fashion is oversimplifying.

If the reader is able to look past Barber's chef-centric view, The Third Plate is a nice new addition to the sustainable food literature.

The Third Plate: Field Notes On The Future of Food by Dan Barber © Penguin Press 2014