Fork to Fork

Don, Monty; Don, Sarah; Wheeler, Simon [Photographer]

ISBN 10: 1850299927 / ISBN 13: 9781850299929

Published by Conran Octopus, 1999

About this Item

In shrink wrap. Looks like an interesting title! Seller Inventory # Q-1850299927

Bibliographic Details

Title: Fork to Fork

Publisher: Conran Octopus

Publication Date: 1999

Binding: hardcover

Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis:

Fork to Fork is about growing and eating your own fruit, vegetables and herbs using Monty and Sarah Don's kitchen garden at Livingston, in the English border. It is also the subject of a Channel 4 series, to be screened in the UK in November 1999. Nowadays food is 'manufactured', imported and marketed for convenience and all-year round availability. As well as losing the link between growing and eating, we have also lost quality and taste- it's not hard to see why asparagus grown at home tastes better than asparagus that has travelled 2000 miles to reach your table. This book returns to the value of real food, and shows both practical gardening and cookery techniques together with 40 recipes. Handwritten notebook entries record the successes and failures of the Dons' gardening year. An appendix gives a useful seasonal conversion chart for gardeners in the southern hemisphere.

Review:

"Self-sufficiency is for cranks," Monty and Sarah Don announce: "organic gardening is not a system to be punished for breaking." In the next breath, however, they inveigh--just as robustly--against the prevailing gardening culture which is all about adding foreign material to the soil: an approach they compare to "throwing antibiotics" at an ill body "and damaging the ability to self-heal."

Monty and Sarah Don are out to steer a middle course between the prevailing, impoverished approach to food production and the behaviours of total cranks whose worry and right-on-ness sucks the pleasure out of the whole business. The book, made to accompany the Channel 4 series, is full of exquisitely simple recipes and fuss-free gardening advice. (The beetroot and red chard risotto is a marvel.) As the diary of a year rooted to the soil, it's sure to be a modern classic. But don't be seduced into thinking it's any sort of bible or cure-all.

It's actually much easier to take advice from a crank--you take what you need and ignore the rest with a clear conscience--than to navigate books like this one, in which everything is tied up with everything else in a seamlessly "sensible"--and unique--scheme. "A boned leg of organic lamb, raised on the water meadow butting onto the garden, strewn with plenty of rosemary and cooked over the most basic of wood fires is not sophisticated cuisine, but a genuine feast nonetheless." Well, sure--but so what?

Monty and Sarah Don are rightly proud of the lifestyle they've achieved. But take their advice, and don't get hung-up. Pillage their prose. Take what you need. --Simon Ings