Win A Free Copy Of Real Food Fermentation

Would you like to win a free copy of my book? Each of the bloggers on my blog tour is giving away two copies of it! So follow along on the blog tour! (And if you don't win a copy, please consider buying one!)

Book Signings at Omnivore Books, WAPF Conference, Etc.; Blog Tour Continues

The blog tour continues, with great posts from Lindsey at Homemade Mommy and Britt at Honest to Goodness Living.

In real life, I have a few exciting events coming up! For full details, see my Events page.

• November 8, 2012, 6PM: Demo, talk, and book signing at Omnivore Books in San Francisco.
• November 10, 2012, 1PM: Book signing at the Radiant Life booth at the Weston A. Price Wise Traditions conference in Santa Clara, California.
• November 15, 2012: Event at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA as part of the Food Literacy program. (Details to be determined.)
• January, 2012 (not yet confirmed): A tag-team book talk and signing at The Ecology Center in Berkeley, California, with the fabulous Nishanga Bliss, author of Real Food All Year, Professor of Chinese Medicine, and practicing acupuncturist.

(Again, for full details about these and other events, see my Events page.)

Real Food Fermentation On Tour

Real Food Fermentation is on tour—a physical tour and a blog tour!

The next stop on the physical tour is at 6PM, Thursday, November 8 at Omnivore Books in San Francisco. Omnivore is a fantastic food-focused independent book store. If you're in the area, please stop by! Full details here.

As for the blog tour…

Every day for the next couple of weeks, someone different will be blogging about my book! Today, Melissa over at Real Food Eater made this awesome post. Head on over, pick up a free recipe excerpted from my book, and put your name in the hat to win one of two free copies of Real Food Fermentation!

Real Food Fermentation Comes To You

I have upcoming events

• on Sept 15 in Providence, RI;
• on Sept 18 in Boston, MA;
• on Sept 20 in West Concord, MA;
• on Sept 30 in Baltimore, MD;
• and on Oct 13 in Santa Monica, CA.

Come see me, get a book, and get it signed! Full details are on my events page, which will be updated as more information becomes available and more events are scheduled.

UPDATE (9/14/2012): There is a new event in Boston on Sept 18. The Cambridge event on Sept 20 has been cancelled. The list above has been updated to reflect these changes. Full info is available here.

Real Food Fermentation Amazon Bestseller Campaign Worked!

We publicized Real Food Fermentation massively yesterday. The goal was to get a lot of Amazon.com orders within a short period of time, so that the book would jump up in Amazon's rankings and attract other buyers.

It worked extremely well. I was thrilled with the results!

With your help, Real Food Fermentation climbed as high as:

#1 in Books > Cookbooks, Food & Wine > Special Diet > Healthy
#1 in Books > Cookbooks, Food & Wine > Canning & Preserving
#1 in Books > Cookbooks, Food & Wine > Vegetables & Vegetarian
#1 in Movers & Shakers in Books
#1 in Hot New Releases in Cookbooks, Food & Wine
#1 in Hot New Releases in Special Diet Cooking
#1 in Hot New Releases in Canning & Preserving
#1 in Hot New Releases in Vegetables & Vegetarian Cooking
#3 in Hot New Releases in Diets & Weight Loss
#5 in Hot New Releases in Health, Fitness & Dieting
#18 in Hot New Releases in Books
#59 in Books

I don't even know what other categories exist on Amazon, where else the book might show up, or whether the above numbers were the absolute peaks. Amazon lists are hard to navigate.

Anyway, a big thank you to everyone, especially those of you who were able to buy the book.

And HUGE thanks to blogging compadres who supported me by reviewing or mentioning it:

• Jenny at Nourished Kitchen
• Ann Marie at Cheeseslave
• Kelly the Kitchen Kop
• Annabelle at Kombucha Fuel
• Erin at Erin's Eco List

My publicity plan consisted of the following:

• Asking a few fellow bloggers to look at the book, and do reviews if they were moved to. (More coming…)
• Stepping up my own blogging
• Emailing EVERYONE I know. Really. Twice. At least. In the process of this, I discovered that a good quarter of my address book no longer worked. I also discovered that gmail cuts you off if you send too many emails too quickly!
• Facebooking and tweeting vigorously throughout the day—and trying to reply or respond to every interaction that anyone had with me.

To be continued…

Make Real Food Fermentation A Best-Seller: Buy It Today

I want to sell a lot of copies of my book. But not so that I can make money. I didn't write the book because I thought it would make me rich. I wrote it because I have an important message that I want to share with the world:

Know where your food is from, and how it was produced. Learn to prepare it yourself. Make yourself healthy and whole. And have some fun, while you're at it!

I am encouraging everyone who's interested in my book to buy it today, June 18 2012, if possible. (Of course if you are reading this post after June 18, I would still love for you to buy my book...)

If a lot of people buy it from Amazon today, then it will have a much better chance of becoming a "best-seller" there. If this happens, other people will see it on the best-seller list, and they'll figure it must be good, so they'll buy it too!

Click here to buy it from Amazon

Alternatively, if there is an independent bookseller in your town, then by all means call them up or wander in; ask them if they have it; ask them to order it for you if they don't; and go buy it from them. By doing this, you will be directly supporting your local economy, which is really important, although your purchase may not have the potential snowball effect of a focused online purchase.

Either way, THANK YOU!!!

Fermentation In The News: Sandor Katz On NPR

Sandor Katz, grand-daddy of the modern fermentation revival, author of Wild Fermentation, and one of my inspirations in my fermentation work and in my life, was on NPR yesterday talking about fermentation and his new book, The Art of Fermentation. The segment was entitled: 'Fermentation': When Food Goes Bad But Stays Good.

Hah!

I am glad that fermentation is getting mainstream airtime. The more people hear about it, the better for everyone.

Sandor's book, The Art of Fermentation, is a masterwork on the subject of fermentation: how to do it, why, history, philosophy, biochemistry—everything. It is ideal for folks who want to know as much as possible about fermentation and fermented foods, who are already actively fermenting things, or who are not afraid of jumping in with both feet.

My book, Real Food Fermentation, is better suited to folks who want to get started with simple fermenting recipes in their home kitchens, who prefer something closer to a more typical cookbook format, and who want a beautiful book with pictures that make the food come alive. I will add that the first 60 pages of my book aren't recipes—they are a discussion of food preserving in general, "real food", sustainability, health, how to choose ingredients, what kitchen equipment to get, and other topics.

Buy one, buy the other, or buy them both!

(If you are buying my book, please consider buying it this coming Monday, June 18, to spike its popularity on Amazon!)

(And in either case, please consider buying from a local independent bookstore rather than online. If we stop buying books from local bookstores, they will all go out of business, and we will be sorry.)

First Review Of Real Food Fermentation

Someone I don't know posted this extraordinarily accurate and thorough (and positive!) review of my book on Amazon.com. He understood exactly what I was trying to do, and why, and how, and all of the decisions I made.

If you would like to know more about my book, I strongly recommend that you click here to read the review. He says it all better than I could.

We all feel misunderstood sometimes. Today I felt really understood. Thank you, Brandon Curtis, if you are reading this!

PS:

If you choose to buy my book, please buy it at your local independent bookstore (which you can find on this awesome list that my friend Paula sent me), or else buy it from Amazon.com on June 18 (or any other day).

I Wrote A Book: Real Food Fermentation

Dear Readers,
I have written a book called Real Food Fermentation. It will be on sale any day now. I have been working on it for over a year, and I'm very excited for its launch! If you don't mind, please wait until June 18 to buy it. If enough people buy it from Amazon on the same day, it will show up on their best-sellers lists, and more people will see it.
Here's why you should buy it:
It is a photo-illustrated, step by step cookbook that shows you how to make fermented foods. The photos really make the recipes come alive (pun intended!). And they are beautiful photos; my photographer is an ace. There are other fermentation books out there, including some new ones, but to be honest, mine is the prettiest by far, and the step by step pictures make my recipes very easy to follow.
Here's when you should buy it:
Please wait until June 18 to buy my book. If everyone buys it on the same day, then my book will rise on Amazon's best-sellers lists, and more people will notice it and buy it.
I'll post a couple more times before then with more details about the book.
(If you want the book but you don't want to wait until June 18, or you think you'll forget about it in the meantime, then of course buy it now!)
Click here to see it on Amazon:

Sustainable Food Book Club

I'm in a book club that reads books about food sustainability. Here is the list of all the books we have read, are currently reading, or are about to read, along with a sentence or two about most of them.

This page will be updated every month, so check back periodically for the latest books.

The current book is: The Jungle: The Uncensored Original Edition, by Upton Sinclair.

Past and future books include:

• Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, by Weston A. Price: Rather that theorizing abstractly about human nutrition, the author sought out isolated groups of healthy people around the world (this was in the 1930s, when there were still isolated groups of people), and documented their foodways. Price's book is jaw-dropping (literally). He describes group after group of people who are healthy in isolation, and become sick, miserable, and toothless when they adopt a "modern" diet. Aren't you curious what they were eating when they were healthy?
  
  
• Goat Song, by Brad Kessler
  
  
• Ripe: The Search for the Perfect Tomato, by Arthur Allen
  
  
• The Town That Food Saved, by Ben Hewitt
  
  
• The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability, by Lierre Keith: An important book for everyone to read—but especially for folks who think they know something about food sustainability. Makes a very compelling case for eating local and against eating grains. Huh? Click here for my full review.
  
  
• Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal, by Tristram Stuart: A very thorough overview of the ways in which we waste food. A discussion of the global implications of food waste. Suggestions for solutions, some more practical than others.
  
  
• Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took on the Food Industry, by Warren James Belasco: A great cultural chronicle, documenting the beginnings of the modern food consciousness movement in the US and its face-off with the establishment, especially in the arenas of advertising and marketing.
  
  
• Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, by Sidney W. Mintz: A history of sugar throughout the ages, with a decided socio-political slant. (Mintz does not discuss sugar's impact on health at all.)
  
  
• Eating Animals, by Jonathan Saffran Foer: An excellent book that treats the question of eating animals in a nuanced manner, going beyond previous books on the subject. Foer's lovely writing makes it a great read.
  
  
• Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong And How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly, by James E. McWilliams: The book presents some good ideas, but is weakened by arrogance and less-than-thorough analyses. His critique of locavorism is ultimately incomplete and flawed. Click here for my full review.
  
  
• Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer, by Novella Carpenter: A post-hippie in inner-city Oakland, California raises ever-larger farm animals on a vacant lot behind her apartment. Reflections about what it means to raise animals, feed them using (mostly) available materials, and slaughter and eat them in the middle of a dense city.
  
  
• Wild Fermentation, by Sandor Ellix Katz: A masterwork on the subject of fermentation, including but not limited to lactofermentation of vegetables. If you are interested in fermenting and the theory behind it, get this book. Sandor Ellix Katz's intelligence and humanity make it a joy to read.
  
  
• The Food of a Younger Land: A Portrait of American Food—Before the National Highway System, Before Chain Restaurants, and Before Frozen Food, When the Nation's Food Was Seasonal, by Mark Kurlansky: In the 1930s, the Federal Writers Project, part of the Works Progress Administration, initiated a project documenting American (United Statesian) foodways, with the goal of compiling the writing into a book entitled America Eats. This work was interrupted by World War II, and never completed. Kurlansky has compiled a selection of this material, and provided it some context and structure. A must-read for anyone interested in food history and/or Americana. And gosh, they ate a lot of beans back then.
  
  
• Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered, by Woody Tasch, with a foreword by Carlo Petrini
  
  
• All New Square Foot Gardening, by Mel Bartholomew: A fresh (ahem) look at how to do raised-bed container gardening at home. Mel has thought of nearly everything, and imposed some kind of order on it or created a system to regularize it. Some of the systems are insightful and some are essentially arbitrary; he leaves very little to chance, and he thinks that this orderliness will make it easier for beginners to grow things. Some gardeners will love this and some will hate it, but regardless, his approach sounds like an effective way to get a large yield from a small plot.
  
  
• Milk: The Surprising Story of Milk Through the Ages, by Anne Mendelson: (from sleeve) "Part cookbook—with more than 120 enticing recipes—part culinary history, part inquiry into the evolution of an industry…" I agree with the sleeve's assessment. The book is part history of milk, part how-to manual for everything you might want to do with milk. And you won't know that you want to do most of these things until you read the book! Mendelson is erudite, thorough, and amusing. Definitely recommended.
  
  
• Hope's Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet, by Frances Moore Lappé and Anna Lappé: Mind-opening, paradigm-shifting, and wise, while at the same time very personal. A look at food issues in several places in the world; their inseparability from economic and social justice issues; and how the keys to resolving these issues lie in how we each look at the world and at our lives. I wish I had written this book!
  
  
• Black Gold, directed by Marc Francis and Nick Francis: A documentary film providing insight into the coffee trade, and some of the lives affected by it.
  
  
• The Coffee Book: Anatomy of an Industry from Crop to the Last Drop, by Gregory Dicum and Nina Luttinger: A big-picture look at the history, economics, and ethics of coffee.
  
  
• A Cafecito Story, by Julia Alvarez, Bill Eichner, and Belkis Ramirez
  
  
• Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty, by Mark Winne: A passionate and cogent look at food justice in low-income urban areas of the US. Winne's years of experience give him a very nuanced understanding of the field, along with a healthy appreciation of the challenges facing us, as a society, going forwards.
  
  
• Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats, by Sally Fallon: This is one of two books I've read recently that has had the greatest impact on me. (The other was The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved.) Fallon's first chapter is the clearest, most comprehensive, and best-documented writing about human nutrition that I've ever read. Furthermore, it disagrees with most of what the USDA and other "authorities" have been telling us for the last 30 years. And it is utterly convincing. If that weren't enough, the rest of the book is a splendid cookbook. READ THIS BOOK!
  
  
• Manifestos on the Future of Food and Seed, edited by Vandana Shiva: An inspiring collection of essays on the subject of food justice on the global stage. If you have any doubt that we are in the midst of a world-wide culture war, fighting for our freedom to feed ourselves as we see fit, read about it here.
  
  
• The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce, and Obsession, by Adam Leith Gollner: An offbeat, aptly-named book on the history of the human relationship to fruit, documenting the author's adventures as he travels around the world in search of unique fruit experiences.
  
  
• Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood, by Taras Grescoe: The best book I've seen on the subject of the health and environmental complexities of eating animals from the water. If you are interested in food sustainability, it's definitely important to read this.
  
  
• The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World, by Michael Pollan: Eye-opening case studies of the history of our relationships to four specific plants. Great to read.
  
  
• The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved: Inside America's Underground Food Movements, by Sandor Ellix Katz: "The personal is political", in the context of food. A sobering and inspiring book about food movements, infused lovingly throughout with the author's feelings about food. This is one of the most powerful books I've read on any subject. It's a great book for anyone saying, "Who cares what we eat," and it's just as good a book for folks who know that they care intensely.
  
  
• Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, by Barbara Kingsolver: A thoughtful and lyrical journal of the author's year of eating locally, including what worked and what didn't, interwoven with a turkey love story (sort of!).