Fall Garden Update (Square Foot Gardening)

I just realized that it's been two months since I last wrote an update about my fall garden.

I still have not purchased Barbara Ellis's The Veggie Gardener’s Answer Book and I'm still a fan of Mel Bartholomew’s All New Square Foot Gardening (click here to view all my posts on that book).

The fall garden has been as productive as the summer fruit and vegetable garden (with yellow pear and grape tomatoes, full size tomatoes, summer squash plants, eggplant, and more) and I've gotten used to eaten salad from greens freshly harvested, making stir-fry with bok choy or mibuna asian mustard greens straight from the garden, crispy roasted homegrown kale, delicious baby ox heart carrots, spicy hot scarlet globe radishes, and I'm looking forward to lots of winter squash.

I highly recommend Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, and Mel Bartholomew’s All New Square Foot Gardening to anyone considering gardening.

Farmer in Chief

If you haven't read Michael Pollan's open letter to John McCain and Barack Obama, published in the New York Times, you ought to take a look.

It's lengthy but worth reading, particularly if you haven't read his recent books In Defense of Food: an Eater’s Manifesto (click here to view all my posts about this book) or The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (click here to view all my posts about this book).

And if you have read Michael Pollan's books or essays on food, you'll enjoy this recent essay even more.

Whether the next President of the United States has read this essay or will in any way change his policies based on Pollan's suggestion remains to be seen...

Anticancer: A New Way of Life

Just heard about a book that sounds like Devra Davis's The Secret History of the War on Cancer (click here to read my entries on that book). The book is Anticancer: A New Way of Life by David Servan-Schreiber, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, cofounder of the Centre for Integrative Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Centre -- Devra Davis is also at the University of Pittsburgh so it makes sense that another book related to the environmental causes of cancer would come from a colleague.

Here's what the publisher has to say about this book, which was published last month:

When David Servan- Schreiber, a dedicated scientist and doctor, was diagnosed with brain cancer, it changed his life. Confronting what medicine knows about the illness, the little known workings of the body’s natural cancer-fighting capacities, and his own will to live, Servan-Schreiber found himself on a fifteen-year journey from disease and relapse into scientific exploration, and finally to health. Combining memoir with a clear explanation of what makes cancer cells thrive and what inhibits them, and describing both conventional and alternative ways to slow and prevent cancer, Anticancer is revolutionary in its clarity. It is a moving story of a doctor’s inner and outer search for healing; radical in its discussion of the environment, lifestyle, and trauma; and inspiring and cautionary in its certainty that cancer cells lie dormant in all of us—and we all must care for the “terrain” in which they exist.

Anticancer takes us on a serious journey and, ultimately, an empowering one. In the tradition of Michael Pollan, John Kabat- Zinn, Barbara Kingsolver, and Andrew Weil, Anticancer genuinely guides us to “a new way of life.”

Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver huh? Well then I definitely have to pick up a copy of this book.

Click here to watch a trailer (yes, a trailer) in Quicktime format for this book.

Servan-Schreiber is also the author of The Instinct to Heal: Curing Depression, Anxiety and Stress Without Drugs and Without Talk Therapy which sounds interesting too . . . it seems to me that we all want a simple answer to all health problems -- preferably just a prescription for pills -- and it would be good to hear from a doctor who seems to break from the orthodoxy and speak out against prescribing the latest drugs.

Click here to learn more on the author's website.

In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan

As promised, here's a bit more on Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food: an Eater's Manifesto (click here to view all my posts about this book).

Most of the contents of this book can be found from other sources by Michael Pollan -- his articles in the New York Times, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan on C-SPAN, and Pollan on NPR several times.

What's new is mostly his lists to help us decide what to eat (and even this can be learned from Pollan's talk on C-SPAN):

Eat Food

• Don't eat anything your great grand-mother wouldn't recognize as food: Don't eat anything incapable of rotting.
• Avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable, c) more than five in number, or that include d) high-fructose corn syrup.
• Avoid food products that make health claims.
• Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle.
• Get out of the supermarket whenever possible: Shake the hand that feeds you.

Mostly Plants

• Eat mostly plants, especially leaves: did you know that the average American eats 200 pound of meat per year?
• You are what what you eat eats too.
• If you have the space, buy a freezer.
• Eat like an omnivore.
• Eat well-grown food from healthy soils: "it stands to reason that a chemically simplified soil would produce chemically simplified plants."
• Eat wild foods when you can: lamb's quarters and purslane, wild game meat, salmon, mackerel, sardines, and anchovies are good bets.
• Be the kind of person who takes supplements.
• Eat more like the French, or the Italians, or the Japanese, or the Indians, or the Greeks.
• Regard non-traditional foods with skepticism.
• Don't look for the magic bullet int he traditional diet.
• Have a glass of wine with dinner.

Not Too Much

• Pay more, eat less: Okinawan's say hara hachi bu, eat until you are eighty percent full.
• Eat meals: didn't there used to be at least a mild social taboo against the between meal snack?
• Do all your eating at a table: your desk is not a table.
• Don't get your fuel from the same place your car does.
• Try not to eat alone.
• Consult your gut.
• Eat slowly.
• Cook and, if you can, plant a garden.

Well, that's it. Pretty simple huh? We should all be slimmer and healthier in no time.

There are a couple of other things I found interesting from this book.



First, since Pollan makes several references to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, I'm glad that I finally read it. And like Devra Davis in The Secret History of the War on Cancer, Pollan also posits that the health industry (as a business) has had much to gain from the unhealthiness of Americans -- Pollan mentions fast food companies while Davis mentions large industrial companies. It's always interesting to see how books by different authors seem to converge.

And did you know that the average American today spends less than 10% of their income on food and less than thirty minutes each day preparing meals, and about an hour each day enjoying them; in 1965 the average American spent 44 minutes prepping meals and 21 minutes cleaning up. This lack of cooking, Pollan postulates, has something to do with our unhealthiness.

And check out these calories per day contributions to America's per capita food supply:

• Corn: 554
• Soy 257
• Wheat 768
• Rice 91

That totals 1,670 and these four crops acccount for two thirds of the calories we eat. It makes me sick just thinking about it. According to Pollan, "humankind has historically consumed some 80,000 edible species, and three thousand of those have been in widespread use." And now we eat mostly just four species, just because they are among the most efficient transformers of sunlight and chemical energy into carbohydrate energy??!

And if that wasn't enough:

• Half of all broccoli grown commercially in the US is the Marathon variety, known for its high yield.
• Most of the chickens raised for meat in America are Cornish cross hybrid.
• More than 99% of the turkeys raised for meat in Americaare Broad-Breasted Whites.

A typical Iowa farm in the early 1900s would have "raised more than a dozen different plant and animal species: cattle, chicken, corn, hogs, apples, hay, oats, potatoes, cherries, wheat, plums, grapes, and pears" and now that same farm would produce just corn and soybeans.

All of this lack of complexity has resulted in a substantial decline in the nutritional quality of produce in this country -- and that's as determined by the USDA.

And here's an interesting quote for you:

The increases in world [omega-6] consumption over the past century may be considered a very large uncontrolled experiment that may have contributed to increased societal burdens of aggression, depression, and cardiovascular mortality.

Hmm, maybe Baltimore would be less violent if it's drug-dealing residents ate a lot more omega-3 fatty acids?!

In Defense of Food: an Eater's Manifesto by Michael Pollan

Over the weekend, I got started on my stack of library books and finished In Defense of Food: an Eater's Manifesto by Michael Pollan (click here to view all my posts about this book).

While I liked this book and would buy it for friends, I felt like I'd heard it all before. I've read The Omnivore’s Dilemma, I've watched Michael Pollan on C-SPAN, I've heard Pollan on NPR several times, and I read his articles in the New York Times.

So while I was glad to read In Defense of Food, I didn't feel like I learned many new things.

Still, I'll post more details about this book -- probably sometime next week.

Click here to read the introduction of In Defense of Food on the author’s website or here to read the first chapter on the NYTimes Book Review website or here to view the table of contents.

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

A few days ago, I finished reading Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.

Even though it was well written and the plot was captivating, I had a hard time reading The Jungle. You just felt so sad for all the characters; Jurgis & Ona Rudkus; Marija Berczynskas & Tamoszius Kuszleika; Teta Elzbieta; Dede Antanas; and all the little children.

The graphic descriptions of the inhumane working conditions, of the disgusting meatpacking industry, of the problems of non-English speaking immigrants, it just made me want to stop reading.

I can see how this book outraged the public when it was published in 1906 and led to the passage of pure food laws.

Even with the pure food laws, it is clear from reading Michael Pollan's The Omnivore’s Dilemma that we still don't know what goes into our food. We think "free-range" is a clear enough term but most of us don't what it really means. We can read the ingredients of a product, but how many of us know that citric acid, lactic acid, glucose, fructose, malodextrin, ethanol, sorbitol, manitol, xanthan gum, dextrins, and monosodium glutamate (among many other common ingredients) are corn-processed additives!

Even though it did not succeed in converting Americans to socialism, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle continues to ring true today. Can you imagine the public outrage and the call for change that would happen if we all knew the truth of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO)?

I am eager to read Steven Greenhouse's The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker (a non-fiction book about the problems facing American workers -- click here to view all my posts about this book), to learn about the problems facing the modern poor and the middle class alike.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma: Discussion Questions

As my book club gets ready to discuss Michael Pollan's The Omnivore’s Dilemma, I've re-read the discussion questions provided by Borders Book Stores and the Sierra Club and I've found a few more (courtesy of Penguin Group); they also seem to be relevant for discussions of In Defense of Food:

1. Michael Pollan approaches eating as an activity filled with ethical issues. Do you agree that the act of eating is as morally weighty as he says it is? What questions concern you most about the way you eat or the way your food is created?
2. Some readers might argue that Pollan’s ethics do not go far enough, perhaps because he does not urge us all to become vegetarians or possibly because of the zeal with which he pursues the feral pig that he kills toward the end of The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Did you find yourself quarreling with any of Pollan’s ethical positions, and why?
3. Pollan argues that capitalism is a poor economic model to apply to the problems of food production and consumption. Do you agree or disagree, and why?
4. Pollan also shows a number of instances in which government policies have apparently worsened the crisis in our food culture. What do you think should be the proper role of government in deciding how we grow, process, and eat our food?
5. How has Michael Pollan changed the way you think about food?
6. At the end of In Defense of Food, Pollan offers a series of recommendations for improved eating. Which, if any, do you intend to adopt in your own life?
7. Which of Pollan’s recommendations would you be least likely to accept, and why?
8. Do you think that the way Americans eat reveals anything about our national character and broader shared values? How is Pollan’s writing a statement not only about American eating, but about American culture and life?
9. In both The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food, Pollan quotes the words of Wendell Berry: “Eating is an agricultural act.” What does Berry mean by this, and why is his message so important to Pollan’s writing?
10. In each part of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan has a particular friend to help him understand the food chain he is investigating: George Naylor in Iowa, Joel Salatin at Polyface, and Angelo Garro in northern California. Which of these men would you most like to know personally, and why?
11. What, in the course of his writing, does Michael Pollan reveal about his own personality? What do you like about him? What, if anything, rubs you the wrong way?
12. If Michael Pollan were coming to your place for dinner, what would you serve him and why?

Michael Pollan in New York

Michael Pollan, beloved author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, will be speaking at PS-1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island, New York at a free event sponsored by the New York Horticultural Society in conjunction with IMPLANT (a group show they've mounted at the UBS galleries at 1285 Avenue of the Americas on 52nd Street that was in part inspired by The Botany of Desire and includes a painting by Pollan's wife Judith Belzer).

The name of his talk is "Taking The Plant’s Point of View." 

I'd love to go, but I just can't make that drive this Friday -- though I did drive up to the spectacular Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania last week.

Click here for more information.

The Omnivore's Dilemma: Part III (Personal: The Forest)

Last week (April 28 - May 2) was Baltimore Green Week so I read:

• Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver
• The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan

And am still reading:

• Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future by Bill McKibben

Today I want to finish writing about The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

I've written about Part I (Industrial Corn) and Part II (Pastoral Grass) and now I will write about Part III (Personal: The Forest).

Pollan makes it abundantly clear that his purpose in investigating the personal (hunted-gathered) food chain is purely philosophical. As Pollan writes, "there are far too many of us and not nearly enough of them" and we simply could not go back to the hunting and gathering lifestyle; it's just impractical.

My favorite quote from the part is from Angelo Garro, a Sicilian and a friend of Pollan's, "You know, food in Sicily doesn't come from the Safeway. It comes from the garden, it comes from nature." And Pollan, speaking of Garro, continues,

So there are eels to catch for the traditional seven-fish dinner on Christmas Eve; chanterelles for hunt in January, wild fennel to gather in April, olives to pick and cure in August, grapes to harvest and crush in September; game to hunt and cure in October; and porcini to hunt after the first rains in November. Each of these rites is performed in the company of friends -- and is accompanied by a good meal, homemade wine, and conversation.

When and how did American lose it's culinary way? As I've mentioned before, my ethnic heritage is Chinese. And for my family, food continues to be central part of our gatherings. We don't hunt, or forage, or even garden. But my mother would always buy fish at the local fish market and greens and other ingredients at the local market. Even today, we always enjoy sitting down for long, leisurely meals (often three hours long, and sometimes up to five or six hours long) filled with joyous (and sometimes intense) conversation and laughter. We eat to savor the flavors and appreciate the effort that has created each ingredient -- as my father used to tell us children, you should think of each grain of rice as equivalent to a bead of sweat from the rice farmer who toiled to grow this. When we travel, we make it a point to eat local foods.

But back to The Omnivore’s Dilemma; I also really enjoyed Chapter 19 Gathering: The Fungi because mushrooms are quite possibly my favorite food! Cream of mushroom soup, polenta with ragout of wild mushrooms, savory mushroom pie, mushroom lasagna, sauteed mushrooms, you name the mushroom dish, I love to eat it.

I didn't know that mushrooms were categorized by the material they grew on. Mycorrhizae (chanterells, morels, boletes, porcinis, etc) grow on live, old trees while saprophytes flourish on dead organic matter (common white button mushroom, shiitakes, cremini/Portobellos, oyster mushrooms, etc.).

This chapter was both interesting and humorous, particularly the mushroom hunting adages:

• "Seeing is boleting" - you never see any mushrooms until someone else has found one
• "Mushroom frustration" - when everyone around you is seeing them and you're still blind
• "Mushroom virginity" - when you haven't yet found a mushroom on a hunt
• "Cluster fuck" - when you've had luck finding mushrooms and other hunters crowd you hoping your luck will rub off on them
• "Screen saver" - after a day of mushroom hunting, you'll close your eyes at night and still see mushrooms!

Pollan's final meal, which he called "The Ominvore's Thanksgiving," consisted of:

Fava Bean Toasts and Sonoma Boar Pate
Egg Fettuccine with Power Fire Morels
Braised Leg and Grilled Loin of Wild Sonoma Pig
Wild East Bay Yeast Levain
Very Local Garden Salad
Fulton Street Bing Cherry Galette
Claremont Canyon Chamomile Tisane
2003 Angelo Carro Petite Syrah

Mmmmmm.........



Pollan's engaging, lucid, contemplative prose in The Omnivore’s Dilemma is simply astounding. I've read much of his writing since I am a faithful reader of the New York Times, but The Omnivore’s Dilemma did not fail to impress me.

I can't wait to read In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto!

Click here to read an excerpt from the author's website.

And click here to read Janet Maslin's review of In Defense of Food titled "Obsessed With Nutrition? That’s an Eating Disorder."

And click here to watch Pollan on C-SPAN.

From what I gather, In Defense of Food is an attack on nutritionism and food science: the idea that food is simply the sum of its parts (nutrients and calories), that the effects of individual nutrients can and are scientifically measured, that the primary purpose of eating is to obtain calories and nutrients and thus maintain health, and that eating requires expert advice.

I think In Defense of Food also expands on some of the ideas in Part III of The Omnivore’s Dilemma like the idea that "[C]uisines embody some of a culture's accumulated wisdom about food" and that "when one culture imports another's food species without importing the associated cuisine, and its embodied wisdom, they've made themselves sick."

Also, I came across four books mentioned in The Omnivore’s Dilemma that I want to read:

1. The Gift of Good Land by Wendell Berry
2. Meditations on Hunting by Jose Ortega y. Gasset
3. The Marriage of the Sun and Moon: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Consciousness by Andrew T. Weil
4. Mushrooms Demystified: A Comprehensive Guide to the Fleshy Fungi by David Arora

And lastly, in case you found this entry because you are reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma for a book club, here are some discussion questions for you to consider (courtesy of Borders Book Stores and the Sierra Club):

• What is the omnivore's dilemma?
• How do we currently make food choices? Do we rely on cultural traditions to guide us?
• Pollan looks at the three food chains that sustain us: industrial food, organic or alternative food, and food we hunt and gather. In industrial food, corn is king. Why is corn so important to the modern food industry? How often does corn show up in our daily diets?
• How do you as a consumer navigate the marketplace to find the healthiest food? How does this affect your food budget?
• What values do you want to support with your eating decisions?
• Which of the four meals Pollan describes--fast food, industrial organic, "beyond organic," or entirely self-made--is closest to what you normally eat? Did you learn anything about how it's made that surprised you? Will you make any changes in your eating habits as a result?
• "If nature won't draw a line around human appetites, then human culture must step in," Pollan writes. Are there certain foods you won't eat for moral, philosophical, or environmental reasons? If so, when and why did you decide to stop eating them?
• Pollan believes that Americans are particularly subject to food fads and anxieties because we have "no strong, stable culinary tradition to guide us." What are your family or community traditions, if any, and how do they (or the lack of them) affect your relationship with food?
• Have you ever grown, fished, or hunted your own food? How does the experience of eating it compare to eating something from a grocery store or restaurant?
• Pollan writes that the pleasures of eating are "deepened by knowing." Do you agree, or are there some things you'd rather not know about your food?
• "Even if the vegetarian is a more highly evolved human being," Pollan writes, "it seems to me he has lost something along the way"--namely, his or her links to cultural and family traditions, history, and biology. What do you think?
• "Eating's not a bad way to get to know a place," Pollan writes. Describe a meal that deepened your understanding of a location you lived in or visited.
• "Is an industrial organic food chain finally a contradiction in terms?" Pollan asks, deciding that it is. Do you agree?

The Omnivore's Dilemma: Part II (Pastoral Grass)

As I mentioned on Sunday, last week (April 28 - May 2) was Baltimore Green Week so I've been reading:

• Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver
• Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future by Bill McKibben
• The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan

Today I want to continue writing about Part II (Pastoral Grass) of The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

Part II talks about two types of food growing chains -- large-scale industrial organic, small-scale pastoral organic -- and culminates with meals at the end of each chain.

At the center of large-scale industrial organic is Whole Foods Market, as well as Gene Kahn of Cascadian Farms (a General Mills subsidiary), Drew & Myra Goodman of Earthbound Farms (producers of those ubiquitous pre-washed baby lettuce mixes), and other smaller industrial scale organic growers (such as Petaluma Poultry and Greenway Organics).

Industrial organic farms tend to grow monoculture (one crop at all times) so while they don't use fertilizers or pesticides, they are still susceptible to the disease and pests that come with monoculture. But because of the massive quantities of compost that industrial organic farms require, they consume huge amounts of petroleum to transport the compost needed!

So are organics good for you? Well yes, science supports the idea that organics do have more nutrients than industrial foods. Organics are full of polyphenols, which may have evolved in plants to defend itself against pests and disease.

And what about "free-range" chickens? "Free-range" hens must stay indoors for the first five to six weeks of their life (to prevent disease) and are permitted to go outside for the final two weeks of their life before slaughter. But most never venture outside and the farmers would prefer that they not go outside as it would make them more susceptible to infection! Nevertheless, the barn doors are open during the final two weeks but the hens never go out because all their food and water are indoors and thus they have no interest in leaving the barn!

On the other hand the focus of small-scale pastoral organic is Joel Salatin's Polyface Farms in Swoope, VA.

Pollan's descriptions of Polyface Farms fill you with wonder. How can 100 acres of pasture patchworked with 450 acres of forest possibly produce tomatoes, sweet corn, berries, chicken, beef, turkey, eggs, rabbits, and pigs? Salatin guesses that in one growing season Polyface Farms produces

30,000 dozen eggs
10,000 broilers [chickens]
800 stewing hens
50 beeves (representing 25,000 pounds of beef)
250 hogs (25,000 pounds of pork)
1,000 turkeys
500 rabbits

Click here to read detailed descriptions of Polyface Farms' products on their website.

By measure of health, Polyface Farms is hugely productive and successful -- it simply has no need for antibiotics and it's animals and plants don't get sick. But even in terms of nutrient produced, one acre of well-managed pasture is more productive than one acre of corn! And a one acre of well-managed pasture can remove 14 billion pounds of carbon from the atmosphere each year, that's the equivalent of removing 40 million cars from the road!

And how does Polyface Farms manage to be more productive in it's "off the grid" farming? By practicing "management-intensive grazing" and following what Pollan calls the "law of the second bite." Simply put, Salatin moves his animals around his pastures in a way that harnesses a great amount of solar energy captured in the form of grasses (such as orchard grass, fescue, red and white clover, millet, bluegrass, and plantain, timothy and sweet grass) and reduces and "recycles" the waste by composting.

In nature, "birds follow and clean up after herbivores" so Salatin puts chickens on pastures three to four days after cattle were on it. The chickens then eat the grubs out of the cowpats (cow manure) and provide fertilizer in the form of its own manure.

In addition, the cows are moved frequently to prevent overgrazing and undergrazing (both of which decrease the ground's fertility) and Salatin has even learned to move his cattle at the end of the day, when sugar, water and minerals have peaked in the grass that his cattle eat. With the proper amount of grazing, the cattle help the grass to become even more vibrant and to convert ever more solar energy into calories!

And I haven't even told you of Pollan's writing of chef's descriptions of the quality of the food at Polyface Farms. People -- chefs, foodies, and locals from Virginia -- all seem to agree that the food from Polyface Farms just tastes better.

And science agrees! Grass-fed meat has more beta-carotene, vitamin E, folic acid, omega-3 fatty acids in the form of ALA (alpha linoleic acid) and CLA (conjugated linoleic acid, a transfat shown to have antioxidant and anti-tumor properties)! Plus it's lower in overall fat and has much lower quantities of bacteria than industrial corn feed-fed meat.

Joel Salatin's Polyface Farms in Swoope, VA sounds truly amazing. Salatin says, "One of the greatest assets of a farm is the sheer ecstacy of life." Wouldn't we all love to experience that?!

Considering Polyface Farms is less than a half-day's drive from where I live in Baltimore, I'll have to make it down there sometime this summer. Maybe in July or August.

And if you're looking to read more on the philosophy of "management-intensive grazing," Salatin (by way of The Omnivore’s Dilemma) recommends these authors and books:

• Wendell Berry: The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture and The Gift of Good Land
• J. I. Rodale (creator of Organic Farming and Gardening magazine which later became Organic Gardening magazine and Prevention magazine): How to Grow Vegetables and Fruits by the Organic Method
• Sir Albert Howard: The Soil and Health and An Agricultural Testament
• Aldo Leopold: A Sand County Almanac: and Sketches Here and There
• Wes Jackson: Altars of Unhewn Stone
• Louis Bromfield: Malabar Farm
• Andre Voisin: Grass Productivity

I'll write about Part III (Personal: The Forest) of The Omnivore’s Dilemma later this week.