I read this book right when it came out, in 2015. I did not know it at the time, but this book quietly planted the seed that eventually led me to create this whole site. I picked it up as a casual nerdy read and put it down as a completely different reader, more interested in learning about where my food actually came from.
Carlisle, a former country music singer turned Harvard grad and geography researcher, follows David Oien, a Montana farmer who in the late 1980s decided to plant organic lentils on his family's 280-acre farm at a time when wheat was treated almost like a religion in that part of the state. Neighbors mocked him and his small group of fellow growers, calling them weed farmers, since lentils looked like nothing but a nuisance crop to anyone raised on commodity wheat. Carlisle embeds herself with these farmers so thoroughly that she is waking up for breakfast at their kitchen tables, and that closeness gives the book its texture.
The science is where it really hooked me. Lentils, like most legumes, fix their own nitrogen and essentially fertilize the soil they grow in rather than depleting it the way conventional grain crops do, which is a big part of why this scrappy group of farmers could build a rotational organic system that did not need the same chemical inputs their neighbors relied on. What started as four stubborn growers eventually became Timeless Natural Food, a real business that now sells to Whole Foods and natural food stores around the country.
This book radicalized how I think about farmers, plain and simple. Before reading it I thought about food mostly in terms of what ended up on my plate. After reading it, I could not stop thinking about the person who grew it, the soil they were fighting for, and the decades of pressure telling them to grow something else instead. It changed my reading patterns completely and turned into a genuine obsession with what I now think of as ingredient biographies, books that follow a single food back to the dirt and the person who chose to grow it against the grain.
I have reread this one a few times since, including once more when I decided to relaunch this site, and it holds up every time. It is also directly responsible for one of my favorite pantry staples. This book is where I first learned about beluga lentils, the small black variety named for its resemblance to beluga caviar, and I have kept at least one bag of the precooked, microwaveable kind in my pantry ever since to toss into whatever I am cooking. Not a plug, genuinely, but the only place I have ever found them is Target, and they are worth the trip if you have one nearby.
If you care about heirloom anything, or if you have ever wondered why the food on grocery store shelves so rarely tells you who grew it, this book is a foundational read. It is not a flashy travelogue the way some food books are; it is a patient, close-up portrait of a handful of people who refused to farm the way they were told to, and it will change how you look at a bag of lentils for good.
