I have mixed feelings about Fasenfest's book. It's part memoir, part gardening how-to, part preserving guide, and dotted with useful recipes. Fasenfest's tone is somewhere out in the field where self-deprecation, auto-horn-tooting, and grumps at the younger generation collide in Venn diagram. In fact, while I agree deeply with her grim predictions about the state of the world and how commodification has turned our natural world into one big Monopoly game where we are not the players but the pieces for another entity, I find the way she's laid some of that at the feet of the glamour of pop culture a bit shallow. The anthropologist in me knows something deeper is going on.

Another thing that troubled me is the manner in which on the one side, she offers such encouragement, and on the other takes swipes at (wrings her hands over?)my generation's "lack of knowledge" of "basic cooking skills". It felt insulting, as a reader. I wanted to sit down over my French press and tell her just because I don't know how to poach something does mean I don't know how to blanch a thing, and gods dammit, I've taught myself food chemistry, basic woodworking, how to crochet, and I am certain I knew more about wild foraging as a child than she ever will (I dug the wild onions to go in Dad's omelettes; I gathered the blueberries for Grandma's muffins; I made the mess that enraged Mom trying to make mulberry juice before I understood the necessity of acids in juice to make it palatable). But that is me seething over this feeling that I, the reader, was being looked at as this helpless thing. At the same time, Fasenfest has an ethic very similar to mine, and gives herself away as as one of the sort of counter culture folk that I regard as deeply entwined with my community, folk very much like my friends and mentors, older, younger, and peers.

It is a terribly useful book for understanding the pattern of effort that goes into householding, the rhythm of the beast, and the ways in which you can "wing it" and the ways in which you can't.

I wonder how Fasenfest's son felt about the book.