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How One Man Turned His Big-City Backyard into a Farm
Scribner
May 2010
On Sale: April 27, 2010
Featuring: Manny Howard
306 pages ISBN: 1416585168 EAN: 9781416585169 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction | Non-Fiction Memoir
For seven months, Manny Howard—a lifelong urbanite—woke up
every morning and ventured into his
eight-hundred-square-foot backyard to maintain the first
farm in Flatbush, Brooklyn, in generations. His goal was
simple: to subsist on what he could produce on this farm,
and only this farm, for at least a month. The project came
at a time in Manny’s life when he most needed it—even if his
family, and especially his wife, seemingly did not. But a
farmer’s life, he discovered—after a string of catastrophes,
including a tornado, countless animal deaths (natural,
accidental, and inflicted), and even a severed finger—is not
an easy one. And it can be just as hard on those he shares
it with. Manny’s James Beard Foundation Award–winning
New York magazine cover story—the impetus for this
project—began as an assessment of the locavore movement. We
now think more about what we eat than ever before, buying
organic for our health and local for the environment, often
making those decisions into political statements in the
process. My Empire of Dirt is a ground-level
examination—trenchant, touching, and outrageous—of the
cultural reflex to control one of the most elemental aspects
of our lives: feeding ourselves. Unlike most
foodies with a farm fetish, Manny didn’t put on overalls
with much of a philosophy in mind, save a healthy dose of
skepticism about some of the more doctrinaire tendencies of
locavores. He did not set out to grow all of his own food
because he thought it was the right thing to do or because
he thought the rest of us should do the same. Rather, he did
it because he was just crazy enough to want to find out how
hard it would actually be to take on a challenge based on a
radical interpretation of a trendy (if well-meaning) idea
and see if he could rise to the occasion. A
chronicle of the experiment that took slow-food to the
extreme, My Empire of Dirt tells the story of one
man’s struggle against environmental, familial, and
agricultural chaos, and in the process asks us to consider
what it really takes (and what it really means) to produce
our own food. It’s one thing to know the farmer, it turns
out—it’s another thing entirely to be the farmer. For most
of us, farming is about food. For the farmer, and his
family, it’s about work.
Videos
Watch Manny's interview by Stephen Colbert
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