Food Lit: A Farm Dies Once a Year: A Memoir by Arlo Crawford

It is time for the next installment of our popular Food Lit Book Club! This is a great way to meet a new friend, to hear a new idea and to share your own stories and sources of inspiration. 

March 15, 2015: Memoir: A Farm Dies Once a Year: A Memoir by Arlo Crawford (2014)

With guest author Arlo Crawford

It’s true, the bucolic landscape I envision when thinking “family farm” no longer resembles reality - a tidy clapboard farmhouse with a big red barn out back, clucking chickens scratching in the yard and cattle lowing in the pasture beyond a split rail fence. But what does a family farm actually look like? And more importantly, what is life like there?

Arlo Crawford brings us into the seasonal cadence of his family’s farm, sharing the joy, heartache and just plain hard work of day to day farm life. He delves deep into the qualities and expectations needed to be a modern day farmer and shows us what it is really like, while telling the story of his boyhood on the land.

Author Arlo Crawford will join us for our discussion.

Food Lit meets every third Sunday of the month for casual conversation around 18 Reasons’ table, usually featuring the author or other expert guest, led by our fearless moderator Heather Knape. We talk about food, flavors, farming, politics, life in San Francisco and anything else that can fit into two hours and connect back to our book of the month.

Please bring a dish or drink to share for our potluck lunch. There are no recipes in A Farm Dies Once A Year, so let’s call this a farm picnic and bring something that fits. Remember, you don’t have to have finished (or even begun) the book to attend; our discussions include space for just-sparked interests as well as fascintating, in-depth debates. 

Heather Knape has been leading 18 Reasons' Food Lit book club since its inception in 2010. She is a freelance editor, writer and photographer who lives in San Francisco. Heather blogs about growing, cooking and eating food with her family, in addition to reading books, at Eating Dirt.