To Boldly Grow: Finding Joy, Adventure, and Dinner in Your Own Backyard by Tamar Haspel

A love-letter to the unexpected delights (and occasional despair) of so-called “first-hand food”—meals we grow, forage, fish, or even hunt from the world around us. To Boldly Grow is “part memoir, part how-to guide and wholly delightful” (Washington Post). When intrepid eater and self-described “crappy gardener” Tamar Haspel and her husband move from Manhattan to two wooded Cape Cod acres, they decide to adopt a more active approach to their diet—raising chickens, growing tomatoes, foraging for mushrooms, and hunting their own meat. They have more ambition than practical know-how, but that’s not about to stop them. As she ventures farther into first-hand food, Haspel learns to rely less on experts (after all, they can make anything grow) and more on her own ingenuity and creativity. Filled with practical tips and hard-won wisdom, To Boldly Grow brings us along with Haspel as she goes from cluelessness to competence, learning what foods the landscape has to offer and discovering that a direct connection to what we eat can utterly change the way we think about our diet—and ourselves.

Categories: Biographies & Autobiographies