Reviews

REVIEW by Becca J.R. Lachman

The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love
by Kristin Kimball
Scribner, October 2010
Hardcover 276 pp., ISBN: 978-1416551607

I started reading The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love over strong morning coffee, but halfway through the book’s prologue, I realized it was Kristin Kimball‘s vibrant storytelling that was speeding up my heart rate. Kimball’s reality TV-worthy memoir narrates her “wild turn toward the dirt” when she falls for an idealist agrarian crazy enough to jumpstart a deserted farm in northern Vermont. In winter. With two people.

But Kimball does much more than follow a man into a pastoral sunset: right from the start, she relishes in her own passion for sustainable food. One moment, she’s a melancholy, high-heeled freelancer cobbling together rent money in New York City; she compares her relationship with food to “one night stand brief encounters with takeout” and uses her refrigerator for storage. The next, she’s writing about “taxi cab yellow” butter she (happily) churned herself. She’s grooming draft horses and realizing that in times of upheaval, people really do go back to the land. And so, perhaps most importantly, Kimball’s memoir is part of a much bigger storyline in America: a growing movement to bring back small farms based on the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) model, where members buy shares at the beginning of a season, then enjoy a diverse harvest. Kimball describes it as building an “iconic farm” from scratch that feeds “a rather large extended family.”

From an organic garden at the White House to chef Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, we are inviting food politics into our everyday conversations. The Dirty Life asks us to further study what we put onto our plates and to investigate how it got there: “There’s a wisdom to the appetite,” Kimball reminds us, “that if you clear out the noise of processed food and listen, healthy and delicious are actually allies. We are animals, after all, hardwired to like what’s good for us . . . Cook things, eat with other people. If you can tire your own bones while growing the [food], so much the better.”

But this is not a memoir that glosses over farming’s excruciating demands—or the realities of a dedicated relationship. Many pages follow Kimball’s emotional rollercoaster caused by exchanging one version of driven “success” for another. The Dirty Life might make you ache to buy a pair of coveralls and start digging&madash;but it will also let you know what you’ll be getting yourself into. After all, it’s the story of an ex-world-traveler-vegetarian whose to-do list for her wedding week reads, “Clear hay from loft. Wire for lights. Slaughter bull for ox roast. Butcher chickens for rehearsal dinner. Write vows.”

More than anything, The Dirty Life encourages readers to rethink their own eating vows. “Food,” Kimball learned, “is the first wealth. Grow it right, and you feel insanely rich, no matter what you own.”