To Boldly Grow

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.