Dora, Hermana Mayor/ Big Sister< Dora

From a writer who traded her single life in the big city to marry a farmer, a riveting account of a year on their sustainable farm—and a real world epitome of Michael Pollan’s food philosophy.

Single, thirtysomething, working as a freelance writer in New York City, Kristin Kimball was living an unencumbered life that she’d constructed as “an adventure.” She was on a certain path but was developing a sense of longing for “home.” When she went to Pennsylvania to interview a young farmer, everything changed. On an impulse, she moved out of the city to a sparsely populated corner of the Adirondacks to start a farm with him. The Dirty Life is a fascinating chronicle of their first year on the farm, from the cold North Country winter through the following harvest season—complete with their wedding, in the loft of their barn.

Kimball shares how she and her husband have created a sustainable farm from scratch—on a disused and not entirely cooperative piece of land. Life is not always convenient (the work is done by draft horses instead of tractors) but their mission: to grow and provide a whole diet—beef, pork, chicken, milk, eggs, vegetables, grains—for a hundred people is invaluable to their community and personally transformative. Kimball discovers the wrenching pleasures of physical work, argues that good food is at the center of a good life, and falls deeply in love, finally finding the permanence she craved in the form of a man, a small town, and a good piece of land.