Essential Gardening Guides

• The Resilient Gardener: Food Production and Self-Reliance in Uncertain Times, by Carol Deppe

• The Herb Society of America's Essential Guide to Growing and Using Herbs, edited by Katherine K. Schlosser

Climate Change

• Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, by Bill McKibben

• The Flooded Earth: Our Future In a World Without Ice Caps, by Peter Douglas Ward

Sustainable Food, Food History, Critiques of Industrial Agriculture

• Independence Days: A Guide to Sustainable Food Storage and Preservation, by Sharon Astyk

• The Coming Famine: The Global Food Crisis and What We Can Do to Avoid It, by Julian Cribb

• Empty Pleasures: The Story of Artificial Sweeteners from Saccharin to Splenda, by Carolyn De La Peña

• Empires of Food: Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of CivilizationS, by Evan D.G. Fraser, Andrew Rimas

• Fresh: A Perishable History, by Susanne Freidberg

• Cooking Green: Reducing Your Carbon Footprint in the Kitchen, by Kate Heyhoe

• Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do About It, by Anna Lappé

• Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food, by Wendell Berry, with an introduction by Michael Pollan

• Food Security for the Faint of Heart: Keeping Your Larder Full in Lean Times, by Robin Wheeler

• 97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement, by Jane Ziegelman

Finding Sustainable Ways to Live

• Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front, by Sharon Astyk

• Growing, Older: A Chronicle of Death, Life, and Vegetables, by Joan Dye Gussow

• Arms Wide Open: A Midwife's Journey, by Patricia Harman

• Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity From a Consumer Culture, by Shannon Hayes

• Life Rules: Why so much is going wrong everywhere at once and how Life teaches us to fix it, by Ellen LaConte

• Don't Make Me Go to Town: Ranchwomen of the Texas Hill Country, by Rhonda Lashley Lopez

• Rosemary Gladstar's Medicinal Herbs: A Beginner's Guide: 33 Healing Herbs to Know, Grow, and Use, by Rosemary Gladstar (reviewed by Khadijah Lacina)

• Squeezed: What You Don't Know About Orange Juice, by Alissa Hamilton (reviewed by Susan J. Tweit)

• Kitchen Literacy: How We Lost Knowledge of Where Food Comes From and Why We Need to Get it Back, by Ann Vileisis (reviewed by Susan J. Tweit)

• In the Green Kitchen: Techniques to Learn by Heart, by Alice Waters (reviewed by Susan J. Tweit)

Briefly...

• If you're a slow cooker fan (I am!), Slow Cooker Revolution belongs in your cookbook collection—and on the kitchen counter beside you as you cook your way through this fine collection of 200 recipes, presented in thirteen chapters. The book's design is a winner. Each recipe includes a list of ingredients (most of them available in your supermarket), a discussion of why the recipe works, prep tips, shopping tips, and side dishes. Best yet, the book is produced by America's Test Kitchen (have you watched the show on PBS?) so you know that everything has been tested. If I had to choose one slow cooker cookbook to keep forever, this would be the one. And it's a super gift for somebody just setting up housekeeping!