Journalist and self-proclaimed “crappy gardener” Tamar Haspel is on a mission: to show us that raising or gathering our own food is not as hard as it’s often made out to be. For a decade she’s been a columnist at the Washington Post.and written about food for two decades, she told Steve Tarter in the interview.
When Haspel and her husband move from Manhattan to the quaint community of Barnstable on Cape Cod, they decide to take a more active approach to their diet: raising chickens, growing tomatoes, even foraging for mushrooms and hunting their own meat. There’s fishing, too.
They find a couple of perennials to start with: Turkish Rocket and Good King Henry. Both are "promises that don't deliver," said Haspel. But with “first-hand food” as her guiding principle, Haspel gamely embarks on a grand experiment to start using her own ingenuity and creativity when it comes to what you put on the table. All the while, there’s humor and common sense to dispense.
Some of her experiments are a rousing success (refining her own sea salt). Others are a spectacular failure (the turkey plucker engineered from an old washing machine). Filled with practical tips and hard-won wisdom, To Boldly Grow allows us to journey alongside Haspel as she goes from cluelessness to competence, learning to scrounge dinner from the landscape around her while discovering that a direct connection to what we eat can utterly change the way we think about food--and ourselves.
Haspel also delivers a tip of the cap to Euell Gibbons whose "Stalking the Wild Asparagus," a book written in the 60s, serves as her "primer on foraging." "He was so adventurous so you don't have to be," she said.
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