Ben Hewitt

This is a book I have been meaning to read for a long time. My immersion in the local food movement came the year after I graduated from high school, at Maggie's Farm, a year-long small-scale sustainable ag and homesteading intensive in my community. I was touring Hardwick while Ben was doing the research for this book [walking around Jasper Hill Cellars and such].

To make things even more intimate, my family has been going on vacation up in the Northeast Kingdom for the past decade or more show more [my mom's from VT], and we had dinner at Claire's shortly after it opened.

In 2010, I got introduced to Slow Money, the intersection of local food and local economy, and haven't looked back since. So Ben's questions of what underlies the adoption and long-term viability of local food systems and a local economy couldn't be more pertinent for me. I actually live in a community not unlike Hardwick [a comparatively strong local food system in an economically depressed rural area], in North Central MA.

This book is excellent. It's a snapshot of a place, a place, and a movement. Ben works his way through a series of portraits, looking at various facets of this picture: the entrepreneurs, the old-timers, the hippies. Many perspectives are captured.

This book is not the decisive map for how to save a town. But I wouldn't want to read such a book anyways. Ben as the vital questions that underlie culture and history. Regenerating a community is a process, not a product. show less

From the title, it sounds like a celebration of the new locavore culture, right? Well, kind of. It’s more of a balanced consideration of the changes happening in a community based in a historical agricultural context. There is an exciting new agripreneurial in Hardwick, VT, but Ben Hewitt spends some time appreciating the sturdy, older food culture that makes the new possible. It’s a fascinating look at how personality and drive can create dynamic change.

"Occasionally, I am visited by a sense of nostalgia, not for an earlier era or for some past event but for the future nostalgia I know I will feel for now."

As I've gotten older I've found that this sense of nostalgia visits me often.

I enjoy memoirs like this about reconnecting with the land and living the way people did for centuries before the industrial revolution. One thing that strikes me about so many of these types of books and the authors that write them is their connectedness to the show more earth but also their detachment from the earth as God's creation. The missing link here is an understanding of our place in the world with respect to the created order. The author here is so grounded yet so aloof as a result of not linking his place in God’s creation. What a marvelous tale this could be with a recognition that the earth is not just a random arrangement of cosmic dust but a created world in which humans are part. show less

I like the manifesto, and I think that this could have been a really stellar essay.

If you're into philosophical contemplations of why money doesn't matter, go ahead and pick this book up. I'm glad he finally figured out that community and relationships are important. I don't think he makes a convincing enough argument, well, about anything -- and I'm definitely a reader that would fall into the category of deeply suspicious of monetary systems. Perhaps this book would be profound if I show more disagreed with him on more things. Instead I found it to be an irritating flood.

It's an interesting premise, but the structure of the narrative just makes me want to bang my head into a wall. Meandering fits of story interspersed with blatant assumptions that he keeps making about his thrify friend Eric's life. Guess what? On further consideration, all of the blatant assumptions turn out to be wrong. And I can work with that as a reader, if it wasn't so darn repetitive -- First he thought this thing! which turned out to be wrong. Then he thought that thing! which turned out to be wrong. Then this thing happens, which leads him to think this other judgemental thing which, wait for it.... turns out to be wrong. *sigh* So not my thing. show less