Ales Frelih Frelih itibaren Marchenky, Poltavs'ka oblast, Ukraina itibaren Marchenky, Poltavs'ka oblast, Ukraina

Christmas With Tucker was a gift from my friend last year. A box of Kleenex later, I made it through this touching story that still warms my heart. Christmas With Tucker is a pre-quel to Greg Kincaid's very popular A Dog Named Christmas ($9.99). It's 1962 in eastern Kansas and young George McCray is living on the farm with his grandparents. George's dad was killed in a farm accident that summer. His mom and older sisters moved to Michigan, but his mother sensed he needed to stay on the farm for a bit longer. As he tries to adjust to the aching holes in his life, Grandpa brings home an Irish setter who belongs to a neighbor serving a sentence in jail. Grandpa warns George not to get attached to the dog, which he promptly ignores. The dog fills some of the void in his life and guides him through a classic coming of age scenario. A major element of the story is Grandpa's job driving the county road maintainer. As a former country girl, I know full well the happiest sound on a winter day is the sound of the road grader opening a snow drifted road. Kincaid does an amazing job capturing that memory. I also appreciated the way he portrayed Grandma as a warm and caring, but hard working farm wife. Christmas With Tucker is sentimental with a strong backbone and the accurate description of rural life gives it strong appeal to wide audiences. It's available today for $9.99.

I'll never look at corn the same way again. This book provokes a lot of thought about the origins of our food and the biological, political, social and economic implications of those origins. I liked that Pollan approached the topic journalistically, with admirably little in the way of political agenda. To structure his book, he uses the format of following the path of four finished meals from origin to plate - one McDonald's meal, one comprised of supermarket organic products, one from a "beyond-organic" self-sustaining farm in Virgina, and one he forages almost entirely on his own. Pollan goes into food science labs and discovers how ubiquitous the use of corn has become in modern diets, and how corn-derived food systems are synthesized and refined into ever more variations to increase our usage and meet industrial demands for market growth. The McDonald's meal he and his family share, for example, ends up being comprised of over 70% corn or corn-fed product (from beef and milk cows fed corn silage and loaded with antibiotics when it sickens them, to corn starches used in buns and chicken nugget fillers, to the high-fructose corn syrup used to sweeten soda and milkshakes). Pollan makes a strong case for how corn and its refined offspring have contributed to the ever-expending girths of Americans in recent decades. Next he looks at the organic market, examining the compromises that many organic producers have had to make to support the demands of national chains like Whole Foods, and what "organic" does and does not necessarily mean. He contrasts corporate organic production with a week he spends working on a farm in Virginia run by a maverick Christian/libertarian farmer who carefully manages a "beyond organic" operation of interdependent, high-yielding crops and livestock on his land. The story of how this farmer guides his farm in a sustainable, symbiotic cycle is absolutely amazing. Lastly, Pollan goes off the grid completely in growing and foraging the means for an entire omnivorous meal - not only growing vegetables/herbs and learning how to scout for edible mushrooms, but actually learning how to hunt and shoot a wild pig in N. California (something my own husband recently did, much to our culinary benefit). The vast majority of people who eat meat will never even lay eyes on the living body of an animal they eat, let alone take responsibility for its demise; so I find a lot of honesty in Pollan's having taken that step in his exploration of the food chain. Overall, this book rocked my world in terms of understanding our modern food chain and its impact on all of us both individually and as a society. As a result, I've been doing a lot of thinking about how I can improve both my diet and my contribution to local/organic food sources. I'm determined to find more ways to eat locally and organically, and I feel lucky to live in one of the best places to do so.