Ditching the Drive-Thru by Natalie Winch is an authentic book. Authentic because she is not a full-time writer with a team of research assistants, but rather is full-time teacher/mom/wife with many side interests.

She wrote this book as a way of sharing her own ─ as she calls it ─ food odyssey. Over time she moved her own family away from what has become typical American fare to farm-sources, fresh, traditional, wholesome food. Her family is realizing health benefits from this.

There is a treasure in our midst. It is the collective body of knowledge developed and furthered by our elders.

With the same certainty that fresh young faces appear on the scene with new ideas, unbridled enthusiasm, and a passionate zeal to make a difference, the elders of our community fade and vanish. Some are appropriately recognized, but all too often the very people who made the most significant contributions to advancing eco-farming first slow down, then semi-retire, battle health woes, and then follow the Biblical imperative “for dust you are, and to dust you shall return.”

Nothing lights up a bookworm like browsing another’s library. Imagine the life-memory-scale thrill of an gardening-loving bookworm given the chance to browse the personal library of organic luminary J.I. Rodale.

Rodale had an outsized influence on preserving and promoting organic farming and gardening. His son Robert took the seeds planted by his father to new levels as evidenced by the work still being done by the Rodale Institute.

In the grocery store the other day we spied two young boys, perhaps eleven or twelve years old, reading the ingredients panel of a package of sugar-frosted, cream-filled dessert cakes bearing some ludicrous name from a decade gone by . . . .

“The true root and basis of all Art lies in the handicrafts. If there is no room or chance of recognition for really artistic power and feeling in design and craftsmanship — if Art is not recognised in the humblest object and material, and felt to be as valuable in its own way as the more highly rewarded pictorial skill—the arts cannot be in a sound condition; and if artists cease to be found among the crafts there is great danger that they will vanish from the arts also, and become manufacturers and salesmen instead.”

Meanwhile an new generation has sprung forth, one so at home with computer technology (having maneuvered a mouse since learning to walk), they are not enamored by it. It is a tool. That’s all. Not the end-all, be-all, salvation of the world. And those archaic devices found in great-uncles’ attics spawn intrigue. Hence the birth of a movement of makers.

In a footnote to the brilliant book, Shop Class as Soulcraft, Matthew B. Crawford writes about the degradation of labor: “. . . any job that can be scaled up, depersonalized, and made to answer to forces remote from the scene of work is vul­nerable to degradation, even to the point of requiring that the person who does the job actively suppress his better judgement.”