When Tamar Haspel and her husband move from Manhattan to two acres on Cape Cod, they decide to adopt a more active approach to their diet: raising chickens, growing tomatoes, even foraging for mushrooms and hunting their own meat. With “first-hand food” as her guiding principle, Haspel embarks on a grand experiment to stop relying on experts to teach her the ropes (after all, they can make anything grow), and start using her own ingenuity and creativity.
Her new book To Boldly Grow allows us to journey alongside her as she learns to scrounge dinner from the landscape around her and discovers that a direct connection to what we eat can utterly change the way we think about our food–and ourselves.
Tamar Haspel writes the James Beard Award-winning Washington Post column Unearthed, which tackles food from every angle: agriculture, nutrition, obesity, the food environment, and DIY. She’s also written for Discover, National Geographic’s The Plate, Vox, Slate, Eater, Fortune and Edible Cape Cod.