Keeping Food Fresh: The Gardeners & Farmers of Terre Vivant

Foreword by Eliot Coleman

Retail price: $25
Our price: $18.75 (25%)
Edition: Paperback
Pages: 6"x9", 160pages
ISBN: 1-890132-10-1
Book Details: illustrations, recipes, appendix, index

By Centre Terre Vivante (Foreword by Eliot Coleman)

Of the many traditional techniques for preserving garden produce, those most common today-canning and freezing-are the most energy-intensive and the most destructive of nutritional quality. In the era of cheap oil, other methods have been widely forgotten, except by traditionalists such as the organic gardeners and farmers associated with the renowned French ecological center, Terre Vivante.

Eliot Coleman, influential co-host of The Learning Channel's Gardening Naturally and author of Chelsea Green's bestselling New Organic Grower and Four-Season Harvest , has been using this book in its French edition for years, and urged us to publish an English edition. In Eliot's view, typical supermarket methods entomb our food in paper, glass, or metal, permitting us to store it forever but stripping fruits and vegetables of nutrients and taste.

"Food preservation techniques can be divided into two categories: the modern scientific methods that remove life from food, and the natural 'poetic' methods that maintain or enhance life in food," writes Coleman in his foreword to Keeping Food Fresh . "The poetic techniques produce live foods like those celebrated for centuries and considered gourmet delights today. The scientific techniques produce dead foods and literally seal them in coffins. My instincts tell me that long-dead foods cannot properly nourish long-lived people."

Terre Vivante, located in south-central France, is a place where people have tried to "get it right," to demonstrate that food can be grown without toxic chemicals, disruptive machinery, and waste. This book, the collective effort of more than 150 organic gardeners working across France and in various corners of Europe, celebrates recipes for storing fruits and vegetables in a form as near as possible to fresh, including:

• Solar and air drying
• Lacto-fermentation in crockery or jars, as in sauerkraut
• Storing produce in a root cellar, attic, or pantry
• Preserving produce in its own juices, or in oil, vinegar, salt, or sugar
• Preserving in wine

The recipes of Terre Vivante might seem unfamiliar or even outlandish. But what's more outlandish is the way that we walk into a mega-market and buy a Granny Smith apple from New Zealand, a cantaloupe from a gas-pressurized warehouse in Mexico, a head of lettuce grown in a chemical soup in Florida, and an artichoke trucked 3,000 miles from the central valley of California.

But home-grown organic produce, deliciously preserved with recipes honed over the millennia, sounds enticing indeed. We can thank the gardeners of Terre Vivante for sharing with us secrets that otherwise would have been lost.

" Keeping Food Fresh is a wonderful resource for anyone interested in experimenting with food preservation techniques. Its fascinating assortment of recipes, coming from many different authors, emphasizes the wide range of creative possibilities for keeping food fresh, healthful, and flavorful. As a commercial producer of lacto-fermented vegetables, I am especially pleased to find in this book a very solid section on lactic fermentation, an important topic rarely discussed in contemporary writing."

About the Authors
Centre Terre Vivante is an ecological research and education center located in Mens, Domaine de Raud, a region of southeastern France. Terre Vivante hosts courses on regenerative gardening and farming, renewable energy, and ecological building techniques. In addition to more than fifty books, Terre Vivante publishes the influential organic gardening magazine, Les Quatre Saisons du jardinage . Eliot Coleman is the author of two best-selling gardening books, The New Organic Grower and Four-Season Harvest.

Terre Vivante is a nonprofit association founded in 1980 to promote a way of life that is respectful of the natural environment. Until the early 1990s, Terre Vivante's main activity was the publication of an organic gardening magazine, Les Quatre Saisons du jardinage . Since 1994, with the creation of a remarkable ecological education center, the work of Terre Vivante has taken on new dimensions, including:

• Construction of hands-on demonstrations of numerous ecological approaches to the challenges of daily hft, for instance energy-efficient buildings, organic gardens, and water-conservation methods
• A range of projects intended to contribute to the revival of a rural region, after years of decline
• Assistance and support for farmers and gardeners, particularly in the development of long-term plans to widen the popularity of ecological agricultural techniques

The design of Centre Terre Vivante's facilities and programs is based upon "first principles"-clean air, clean water, and clean food, which used to be the birthright of all people. Although the effects of pollution can now be traced throughout the world, at Terre Vivante the malign impacts of human development are being minimized. On formerly infertile land at an altitude of more than two thousand feet above sea level, Terre Vivante's horticulturalists are growing a wide range of foods, induding forgotten or endangered varieties, relying entirely upon composts and organic fertilizers generated nearby In addition to vegetables and flowers, visitors can see a bamboo garden, nursery, playground, wild meadows, and a constructed wetlands for waste-water treatment. Terre Vivante's buildings demonstrate the potential for earth-friendly construction, utilizing passive and active solar features including photovoltaics, composting toilets, solar and wood-burning water heaters, and natural materials. The center's restaurant offers delicious meals made from locally grown ingredients, featuring many regional favorites, and has been described as having "the finest restaurant view in Europe."

The publishing program of Terre Vivante has grown beyond production of the magazine Les Quatre Saisons to encompass a list of more than fifty books on a diversity of subjects, including organic gardening, health and nutrition, ecological building methods, and environmental education. An ongoing series of lectures and workshops is also offered at the center, with schedules available on Terre Vivante's web site.

Centre Terre Vivante is open to visitors from May through October. For more information, please contact:

Terre Vivante Domaine de Raud telephone: 33 (0)4 76 34 80 80 BP 20-38710 Mens cedex fax: 33 (0)4 76 34 84 02 Isére, France

This is the current list of our selected books:

• Who Owns the Sun?
• Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World
• The Man Who Planted Trees
• Stranglely Like War
• Plants For a Future
• Keeping Food Fresh
• Hand-Sculpted House (Cob House)
• The Straw Bale House
• The Humanure Handbook
• Forest Gardening
• Gaia's Garden
• Hemp Horizons
• Wise Words from the Good Life (the Nearings)
• Autobiography of Scott Nearing
• Loving & Leaving the Good Life
• Hooked on Raw
• Raw Kids
• Perfect Body
• Raw Life
• Timeless Simplicity (out of stock)
• Emperor Wears No Clothes (out of stock)