A Manual for Farm Life

Rainy winter days like today are fine ones for curling up on the couch with a book, as my daughter and I did this afternoon (or, if you’re four and live where it’s 70° in January, they are fine days for putting on your rain jacket and boots and splashing around in puddles, as my daughter did this morning).
After my daughter’s fourth birthday in December, we started reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series, which begins with Little House in the Big Woods. We are now over half way through the second novel, Farmer Boy.
I had never read the books when I was a child, and got the idea from a friend whose daughter was enjoying them. The fascinating part for me is that the books (the first two, at least) are really all about food. There are thick descriptions, not just of what the family eats, but how it is grown, harvested, stored, and prepared. I often feel hungry while reading the details of the meals. Wilder gives complete instructions for planting a potato field, harvesting dried beans, how to grow a milk-fed pumpkin, making cheese and butter, maple sugaring, and making candy and ice cream, and that only begins to describe the variety of food-related tasks she writes about.
These books are oddly relevant now, in a time of renewed interest in local food, grown by our own hands or people we know; in the recession-era renaissance of home arts like cooking, canning, and preserving. This is food as it ought to be, and, for most of human existence, has been.