In my paying job as a food writer, I get (after a winnowing process) quite a few cookbooks and food-related books to read and review. I don’t get the opportunity to review THAT many in the Austin Chronicle; maybe 6 a year….the rest I will be reviewing here, and on my FOOD BLOG (Hungersauce.com). Here’s one Now!
I am pretty sure that the latest stack I got from my boss came to me because they are advance “proof” copies with absolutely NO resale value. That’s okay; if I were the Food Editor I would want first crack at the resale dough myself, PLUS, my boss is very cool about giving us any book we are dying to read, even when the resale value is HIGH.
So the copy of this book that I got is essentially printed on toilet paper with NO photographs, but that didn’t stop me from ploughing through it at high speed because the topic is very interesting to me: very small farming. If I were younger, like thirty, I would TOTALLY be trying to buy a small farm at this point, that would be AWESOME. I could do it too! Plus Dave would L*O*V*E IT ! But I think I am getting too old to do that backbreaking of physical labor. I think I would be wise to stick to the gardening. Oy Vey.
But THIS GUY, in this book, he made the transition to farming from chef-ing in his twenties, and also did the thing where he worked in his OWN restaurant in his twenties (I wish I had gone that route, but it wasn’t possible, I was touring with my band) and then was a RESTAURANT OWNER in his thirties (a better gig) while he was getting his farm off the ground. Then he had a couple of hundred thousand dollars to live on from selling his restaurant while full-time farming. It wasn’t easy or anything, but it was POSSIBLE, more possible that if he had tried to figure out farming with NO money behind him.
The author is not a particularly great writer (this book isn’t Blood, Bones and Butter!), but he writes in a simple and direct style that is completely appropriate to the subject matter. The book is saved from dryness by his engaging humility. He really is not an egoist (odd in a chef, I know!), thank Goodness; if he were it would be a terrible book. But Timmermeister comes across as a really nice person who seems to feel pretty much like a dolt (he isn’t, but you can tell he feels like one), who is eager to tell his story and also share information , HARD-WON INFORMATION, about trying to figure out farming with no one to teach you, while trying to hide what a dolt you are from “real farmers”.
Lots of great information about hog butchering, cow milking, cheese making, vegetable marketing, and orcharding. It is more detailed than the information in the Little House on the Prairie books (Laura Ingalls Wilder goes into great detail about many of these topics, especially in the less popular Farmer Boy, one of my favorerites (probably because of the hog butchering)). Timmermeister would have had a leg up if he had just read the series! But you know what they say, boys won’t read books where the hero is a girl! But anyway, this book, GROWING A FARMER, was absolutely down my alley and I enjoyed it greatly. It was very interesting, in the way that only interesting autobiography can be.
