Food Heroes

Sandor Katz’s love of fermented food started with kosher dill pickles he ate as a New York City kid. As an adult, he left the busy city and moved to a queer community in the mountains of Tennessee. There, his friends grew their own food, cooked and ate together, and sometimes danced in drag when the work was done. One day, the cabbages were all, ALL ready to be harvested. What to do? Sandor tried to make sauerkraut. Delicious! He kept experimenting, finding old recipes, combining old ideas to make something new.

This fifth title of author Jacqueline Briggs Martin's award winning "Food Heroes" series features Farmer Eva Sommaripa, who founded Eva's Garden in South Dartmouth, Massachusetts, a place "so close to the ocean, she can smell the sea, so close to woods she can talk to trees." More than 50 years later she has grown a big green garden life of friends and neighbors, creatures that crawl, fly and slither, even microbes that create rich soil in the brown underground.