Green Options

My bookshelves creak with the weight of my amassed food preservation resource collection.  As we grow over 70 percent of our food needs on our Wisconsin farm and B&B, Inn Serendipity, the how-to behind stocking up has always been area of personal, passionate research.

But as you can see, I’m already overloaded with info.  Do I need another food preservation book?  Not really, until I read Sharon Astyk’s latest book:  Independence Days:  A Guide to Sustainable Food Storage & Preservation, a new release from the fine folks at New Society Publishers.  Lots of books, those on my shelves included, successfully detail the “how” of food preservation, from water bath timings to prolific pickling techniques.  Independence Days freshly blends “how” with “why,” serving up a modern take on stocking up and why this plays a vital role in our future survival as a planet.

Astyk’s approach, blending practical information and big picture context with a hefty dose of personal anecdotes and essays, nurtures readers into realizing they are doing more than creating a January supper when one puts up tomatoes in July.  We’re collectively part of a larger, strategic, hands-on revolution in kitchens across America to change the way we approach food, sustainability and life.

Here’s a sampling of fresh, inspiring perspectives I harvested from Independence Days:

Granted, food lovers tend to migrate toward cookbooks as their foodie literature of choice. But, particularly amidst today’s economic gloom, it’s good to keep a well-balanced diet and chew on some advice about navigating the turbulent times that lie ahead.

New York homesteader and writer Sharon Astyk delivers such inspirational, nutritional nuggets in her new book, Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front (New Society Publishers). The subtitle describes her true calling: One Woman’s Solutions to Finding Abundance for your Family while Coming to Terms with Peak Oil, Climate Change and Hard Times.

Astyk draws on her academic background and ideas developed on her prolific, widely-read blog to offer a reality check on the tough times to come: It will get worse before it gets better and she had the numbers and analysis to prove it. This book takes local, seasonal and organic eating a step further into the future – what happens when peak oil hits, everyone is homebound and farmers markets and retail in general dry up while we weather the crisis?