I will make you a promise: If you just start this fiery manifesto, you will read it to the end, and be sad when it is over. You will be thrilled at what you learn. It is one of the grittiest, wittiest, and wisest books I’ve ever encountered. You will learn, squirm, be shocked, and be enriched.
Then you will likely try to figure out a way to farm something, even if it is a tomato plant on your deck. That’s one takeaway, but there is so much more. The author preaches on biology, regenerative methods of agriculture, hard work, birthing, breastfeeding, immigration, body positivity, God, class and race, gender roles, government regulations, and fashionable cliches such as diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Every sentence is a takeaway. There is no one alive who won’t be provoked and improved by encountering this book, especially in these times in which everyone is confused about science, faith, lifestyle, and one’s general place in the social structure. This book offers a clarifying alternative, based not on theory but real experience.
We face a paradox in publishing today. The number of books being published seems to be exploding exponentially. As print-on-demand tech has advanced and automated tools have appeared everywhere and with ever-lower prices, it seems as if there is a tsunami of new books being dropped daily.
Meanwhile, the classics are read less, even though they are free for the download and ever more accessible. Indeed, people are seldom reading anymore. Only 16 percent of Americans older than 15 read for leisure daily, down from 28 percent in 2003, while a quarter of adults read nothing for leisure. Book sales are falling, as are profits for publishers.
So I’m always looking for books to recommend to cause people to remember how great it is to sit down with a great story by one author, whether fiction or nonfiction. I’m looking for wonderful, life-changing books to urge on people so that they can see what they have been missing by not reading. This is my mission.
The story this woman tells is absolutely wild. Engelhart is a New York state girl raised in an agricultural setting. Sneaky and rebellious, she pursued the life of the black sheep of the family, moving to California, dabbling in the music business, opening a studio, having it flop, and then going into restaurant work while adopting a fashionable left-wing political bent.
A rebel at heart, she went full vegan, basing this mostly on superficial peace-and-love impulses combined with revulsion for the very idea of death. She opened a vegan ice cream shop that was eventually combined with another business to become a restaurant. She was an ideologue and preacher of this cause, successful, self-satisfied, and childless.
Life took some circuitous turns and she found herself married to a man with a wholly different history and background, an immigrant from Mexico with native roots. Together, they decided to get extra crunchy in a back-to-nature way. They bought a small farm in California to make the dream of vegan perfection come true.
“Picture me in [Los Angeles], dishing out cashew ice cream and kale bowls, proud as can be, thinking I’d cracked the code—I was feeding people while saving the planet, and no harm done,“ she wrote. ”Fillmore was going to be the next step: twenty acres of peace—a sanctuary where every goat, duck, and sheep got a happy ending. I was dead set on it, like it was a mission from God.”
This is where the book gets wildly interesting. It’s the story of a privileged and precious lefty confronting the harsh realities of the natural world. Her every assumption about nature collapsed once she dealt with real life on a farm.
A memorable passage describes Engelhart’s first high ambition of planting avocado trees with the hope of sending them around the country as luxury goods: avocados raised on a small farm by a family. She and her husband put the plants in the dirt. In a matter of days, every squirrel from miles around descended on the farm, eating up all the roots, wrecking the soil, and killing the trees.
Now this vegan faced a problem. In order to get good vegan food, she would have to figure out a way to remove the hordes of squirrel migrants who were making it all impossible. Next thing you know, it was the squirrel killing fields. Unfathomable amounts of squirrel deaths, with piles of corpses hauled off daily. There was no choice: Either the squirrels ruled or the avocado trees had a chance for life.
Yikes; what an introduction to the real world. She quickly came to realize how utterly untenable vegan theory truly is. Or, put another way, it is only sustainable if you are rich, urban, protected, and wholly removed from the source of the food itself. It is a luxury belief system rooted in silly myths that ideologues invent to keep themselves from thinking about real life.
This was the beginning of Engelhart’s transformation. Chickens, ducks, lambs, goats, and cows were added to the scene, and the book walks the reader through Engelhart’s discovery of the full integration of nature and the impossibility of severing one part from another. As part of this cycle, she gained a full education in the place of people within it.
“We’re so far removed from the fight for survival that we’ve turned death into a philosophical playground,“ Engelhart wrote. ”We debate the ethics of meat while sipping oat-milk lattes, ignoring the field mice shredded by combine harvesters to grow our oats.
“We agonize over factory farms but shrug at the pesticides that wipe out entire ecosystems to protect our kale. Our comfort—our grocery store, our delivery app—has given us the luxury to judge death from a distance, to pick and choose what feels ‘right’ without ever facing the consequences.”
Consider this shocking passage: “Every bite we take is tied to death—somewhere, somehow. The vegan avocado, prior to the massacre. Toast I once served with pride? It came at the cost of those squirrels—tens of thousands of them over the years, their lives snuffed out to protect the grafted trees.
“The organic spinach in my salad? It grew in fields where insects were crushed, where soil was tilled over nests and burrows. We can’t escape it. We’ve just learned to hide it—to pretend our hands are clean because the blood isn’t on our plates.”
And here she has many views, some of which are guaranteed to shock common sensibilities. The childrearing portion is sure to infuriate and amaze. In between, she added compelling narratives on issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion, along with her switch of voting loyalties from blue to red.
There are even intriguing diet suggestions, such as her raw-milk-only fast, one of which lasted 40 days.
“Twenty pounds melted off, inflammation vanished, energy surged like I’d tapped some ancient well,“ she wrote. ”My stomach flattened out, my cravings for carbohydrates disappeared, and even a strange little cyst on the bottom of my foot went away. The inflammation in my hands and feet that used to hit me every morning? Gone. I’m back in clothes I hadn’t worn since before my kids were born.”
Crazy? I don’t think so. There is a strange magic to things natural. Science can only begin to explain it.
Whew, this author is a pistol and this book is raw. Nothing I could write about it would be as compelling as her prose, which has the temperature of blazing white heat. She is like a female Joel Salatin, the philosopher-farmer who wrote the introduction. There is not one moment in the book in which she shies away from her passion to tell what’s true.
Doesn’t this sound like the perfect book to restart your love of reading? I think so.
