Do tricks. Get fed.

Speaking as a recently rehabilitated lover of Pop Tarts and Easy Mac, I have recently (the last year or two) actually started to wonder about where my food comes from, and what the process was that brought it before me. There are plenty of books out there now for the curious (Fast Food Nation, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, etc), but I, for one, am only interested in taking nutritional advice from a reclusive, bearded old Japanese farmer—specifically, The One-Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka (recently rereleased by the NYRB). In this wonderful little book, Fukuoka lays down the details of his unique practice of sustainable, “do-nothing” farming, and speculates on the not-so-awesome ramifications of industrial agriculture and your typical food consumers disassociation from their hunter-gatherer forebears. Fukuoka died last summer, at the ripe, wrinkly age of 95, so I think it’s safe to say that his methods worked.