Book review: Gaining Ground by Forrest Pritchard

efore I begin my review of Gaining Ground, allow to me to make a quick disclaimer: I am not an objective reader. In fact, I have worked for Forrest at farm markets every weekend for over a year now, in rain, snow, wind, thunder and tourist season. Before Smith Meadows came into my life I was largely vegetarian in order to avoid sponsoring the horror stories I read about the papers and books like Omnivore's Dilemma and Deep Economy. Then, through a boyfriend's friend's sister's best friend I found Smith Meadows, the perfect local farm with all the practices and principles an idealist could hope for.

Forrest Pritchard is Smith Meadows' farmer, its steward and practically a part of the soil he has worked so hard to nourish from the sad state it was in after years of overuse. As it turns out, lush pasture is easily achieved through a combination of patience and well planned herd rotation, switching between cattle, pigs, chickens and sheep, letting each fertilize and refresh the soil in turn. "Easily," of course, is a relative term when one is reading about it all from a comfy chair with a nice cup of tea.

In truth, it took not only years of hard work but decades of failure for the Pritchard family farm to turn around and produce a profit (as well as valuable land, animals and a sterling example of good farming practices). Gaining Ground recounts the journey Forrest took his entire family on when he realized that farming might be more of a calling for him than teaching (though writing is clearly still in his repertoire). As a bit of a book connoisseur, I did note that the book itself has a good looking, glossy cover, the text is printed clearly on nice feeling paper and the photos are incredibly helpful in placing the reader right there on the farm.

Gaining Ground has a good flow that kept me impatient to turn the page for the next adventure or roadblock, even though I knew exactly how it turned out. Forrest's anecdotes are sometimes touching, often hilarious, and range from rampant hogs to very confused market customers to a couple of completely baffling exchanges with a butcher. Pedro the goat, for instance, accompanied by Travis the humming farmhand, has a highly amusing adventure with some marigolds, in true goat-style.

As somewhat of an insider, I also know that there is a lot left out of this 317 page book. There were more adventures with goats, some ducks, more about Nancy's pasta business, a food truck and many more humorous stories from market and the farm. One hopes there will be a second book in the works... I, for one, would have enjoyed the inclusion of Forrest's other writing, perhaps the poetry he mentions sending off to literary magazines early on. The book stands at the right length and breadth to be a reasonable and fun read (One of Publishers Weekly's top 10 summer reads in nonfiction), though the prose could have dug a little deeper into the emotional underpinnings here and there.

The other members of the family receive occasional mentions, but the elder Mr. Pritchard has a fair share of the spotlight as he does his best to support his harebrained son through the snafus and disappointments of starting his free-range, grass-fed meat business. Mr. Pritchard's declining health provides a backdrop that Forrest puts to use in framing the problems with the commercial food industry and how we think about food in terms of cost, taste and enjoyment. On the whole, Gaining Ground is a good story, not an essay on farming practices, and it is this difference that will help readers to understand on a personal level what it means to buy local and why they too should work to save the family farm.

I did have one customer at market ask if Gaining Ground was a collection of recipes from Smith Meadows Kitchen, and when I passed this along to Forrest he said, "Sure, it's a recipe book. There's a real important recipe in there, they'll just have to read all the way to the end."

Gaining Ground is available on Amazon.com, in hardcopy and Kindle editions, and on IndieBound, as well as at your friendly local DC farm markets listed here. If you bring your copy to Smith Meadows farm day on June 1, Forrest will be happy to sign it for you. He may even sign copies brought to the Arlington and Takoma Park markets where he usually can be found on weekends. I will be putting my signed review copy in the Little Free Library for which I am co-steward. Pass it on!

Toothsome quotations: WASPs vs. YSL

The linguistic philosophers of France, especially the late Roland Barthes, understood how French cuisine and French culture are related, and how both fit with structuralist philosophy. A Parisian dinner is mean to be a single elegant statement, like a well-turned sentence or an outfit from Yves Saint-Laurent. The Anglo-Saxon view of a banquet can be expressed in terms of the history of the world. You begin with soup – water with things swimming in it – then move on to the aqueous kingdom, then to flying creatures, then to mammals. Finally you celebrate man in cheeses and desserts, both products of sophisticated culture. This is the diachronic view, which the French reject. They prefer to see the various courses as syntagms, or sentence components – soup adjective, fish noun, chicken adverb.

-Anthony Burgess, "The Language of Food" in Homage to Qwert Yuiop, found in The Ravenous Muse, Karen E. Gordon, ed.

Toothsome quotations: 'In herbis'

In an age when just the composition of a salad required a great knowledge of herbs, their flavours and combined tastes, it was commonly said that "In herbis, et in verbis et in lapidibus sunt virtues" ("There are powers in herbs, words, and stones"). The syncretic character of late medieval cuisine... finds a mirror-like reflection in the taste for farce and linguistic blending, and in the interweaving and overlapping of words. Farce, whether "stuffed" or "mixed," makes up the combination of seasoned ingredients which conspire to please the palate; it is the dietary archetype at the origin of linguistic structuring and presides over the stuffing of vocabulary and locutions.

-Piero Camporesi, Bread of Dreams, from the collection The Ravenous Muse, Karen E. Gordon, ed.

On Books and Sharing

I have determined that sharing books makes them more enjoyable for all parties involved. This means that being a librarian is a fantastic job! I've also found that passing off a book to a friend, or receiving one, makes reading a shared experience, instead of a private one. I used to always have my pile of books that I would blaze through and not really talk about with anyone. Books were a private affair, something personal and intimate that had nothing to do with anyone else. Of course, books present themselves differently to each reader depending on that person's history, but there are certainly things that may be common to multiple readers, and this is what is enjoyable when sharing.

And in the vein of sharing, don't forget about Bookcrossing, where you can tag and release a book into the wild. I found my first Bookcrossing book in Glastonbury Tor, lying on a bench in the corner. It was Caught in the Light, and it was a very odd read, but something new and different that I might not have picked out for myself. Having another person's insight (un-informed in this case) into what I might like broadens the spectrum of book possibilities.

Recently, I've shared the following books in some way:

MFK Fisher's Gastronomical Me, originally lent to me by Tristan (who might in some circumstances be called my boss) when he found that I was helplessly interested in the culture and cooking of food. The book came to me at a critical turning point in my life in the Fall of 2008, and gave me great hope for the future, not to mention inspiration for a way of living fully. I received my own copy as a birthday gift this year, and immediately passed it on to Dan, who is plodding through it and enjoying it thoroughly.

Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate, came to me from D, although we found the copy together in the Arlington Public Library's bookshop. There's a theme emerging here about food writing, which goes on to include Deep Economy (to some extent. Also lent to me by T) and Secret Ingredients, which I picked up in a moment of impulsiveness at Brattleboro Books (website has issues).

I just passed off The World Without Us to T last night, my copy of Ex Libris is with D, and I'm moseying around in D's copy of High Tide in Tuscon. I ritually post links in my twitter to interesting reviews, poke people when I think they might like something, and talk to shopkeepers and librarians for recommendations. The nice guy in Mystery on Main (David?) and I spent a while perusing shelves for books about books (a new favourite category, along with food/cookbooks). We came up with The Last Detective and The Oxford Murders, which I need to go back and get. At the time I bought Booked to Die and The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane. All of this was inspired by The Club Dumas (made into the movie The 9th Gate), which was lent to me by Don, mid 2008. At some point I'll collect more of Arturo Pérez-Reverte's books.

Of course, before any of my books leave home, I brand them with my embossing stamp, just to be sure then come back.

Questions for readers: Too many links? Would you prefer links to Amazon for books? I think Library thing is more useful for seeing recommendations, tags and similar works with.

Sources

If I was a skilled blog writer, I would have a clever title that wraps up the various subjects in my posts and ties them all in a neat bundle. For example, "Sources" should have the bits I'm going to write, but also something about, I don't know, primary sources, research, reference, wells, genealogy... But it doesn't, so here we are anyway:

I take distinct pleasure in knowing where things come from. Not just that, but having a story of some sort attached to things. It gives them meaning beyond "thing," making me feel a little less guilty about all my material possessions. I tend to buy more when I'm on vacations, because it allows me to come back and say, oh, this skirt/pair of shoes/earrings/etc came from London/Avignon/Greece/etc. Far better than *another* shirt from the Gap. Who doesn't have one of those? It occurred to me as I was making toast this evening that this applies not just to material things, but food as well. My dinner tonight:

Toast: Oatmeal molasses bread I made yesterday from organic ingredients. The recipe came from a baking book I first met while house-sitting my first summer in Marlboro. That was my first time with a kitchen all to myself, and I went a little nuts cooking.. at least when there were people to feed. On the toast is soft goat cheese I bought from a friend in Marlboro the other day, and cinnamon pear jam from Sidehill farm in the Cotton Mill complex in Brattleboro. I discovered them while gallery sitting during the Cotton Mill open house three years ago. They also make a very tasty mango-habenero jam.

Salad: Less of a story here. Some goat feta from the same source in Marlboro, and fresh avocado, pepper, romaine, cucumber from Dutton's farm stand in Brattleboro. I had bicycled to Dutton's earlier this week from a friends house in West Bratt as a trial run for biking in town. I'd say it went fairly well. I just like being able to get somewhere on the bike instead of going for the heck of it all the time. Ah, but the reason I started in on salads at home in the first place goes back... five or six years now, to when I had my first goat cheese salad at the Riverview. Which reminds me, I forgot the cranberries.

*runs off to perform salad modifications*