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That’s the beginning of Farmer John’s Cookbook: The Real Dirt on Vegetables: Seasonal Recipes and Stories from a Community Supported Farm, by Boone County’s walking collection of ironies, biodynamic farmer John Peterson. Its generous format encompasses more than 200 recipes (organized by vegetable and season) in more than 300 pages, and it’s one of the few cookbooks you can enjoy reading when you’re not hungry.
Ideally you’d view the Farmer John movie or check out the Reader‘s 1994 (May 13) and 2006 (January 20) coverage first, so as to know where this guy is coming from. He’s a farmer and an artist; a steadfast local whose neighbors almost ran him out of town; a Midwestern original who revitalizes himself with periodic visits to Mexico; and a businessman who believes, with Rudolf Steiner, that “the root primarily nourishes the head particularly; the middle of the plant, stem and leaves, primarily nourishes the chest particularly; and fruit nourishes the lower body.”
