Deeply Rooted: The Three Little Agrarians and the Big (Bad?) Agribusiness
By Gregg Miller
July 16, 2009
A dairy farmer. A stockman. An organic farmer.
There, that’s it, that’s Deeply Rooted. If you choose to pick up this visual, emotional, well-written book by Lisa Hamilton, that’s what you’ll find. Perhaps her background as a photographer coupled with her writing experience produced a book that is more a series of three portraits than a structured narrative. There is no over-arching argument. No heart-wrenching tale of doomed polar bears. No imperatives for the reader about how they should live their lives.
The stories of the three agrarians speak for themselves. Thanks to eloquent writing and a penchant for beautiful – but never superfluous – description, Harry Lewis and Virgil Trujillo and the Podoll family come to life. As we read we feel their struggles and see the insurmountable obstacles they regularly face. We look into the deriding eyes of neighbors wedded to large scale agribusiness and ask ourselves why we keep working so hard to maintain our family farms. Our finances are always just barely allowing us to feed ourselves and keep our roofs over our heads.
The structure depends on successful portraiture for the reader to relate to the characters and empathize; going from line to line of text, the reader must see their own values in that of the Americans depicted and to see something in those lives that is worth… well worth what? Worth saving? Worth protesting in activist circles about? Worth blogging about? Deeply Rooted never explicitly encourages any reader behavior or action, but it is so well written and the lives in it so pulsing with vivacity that the reader feels a deep connection that demands no definition and inspires contemplation. By any judgment, a truly bold and risky approach to writing and selling a book (a review of Coming Home to Eat can be found here and shows how such styles can lead to a poor final product).
And yet such a style might be exactly what the umbrella environmental movement and its subsidiary slow foods initiative need most. The typical arguments behind slow-food and locavore lifestyles can be summed up with three points: the average bite of food in America travels 1,500 miles before entering our mouths; the methods used to produce our food are unsustainable; and individual farmers receive only a tiny fraction of the proceeds garnered in our favorite supermarkets.
Deeply Rooted is an important resource for those seeking a more integrated education on the issues of where our food comes from. Statistics will only get you so far as there are only so many headlines to be made, and many of these numbers and facts are repeated so frequently that any inherent power they once retained becomes heavily eroded. Lisa Hamilton takes a more sophisticated tact with her portraits; there are thousands of individuals with their own struggles and stories, and each one is unique in their power. Deeply Rooted attacks the issue on a deeper level of humanity — here are the faces behind a social dilemma. They are as real as you or me, and Hamilton’s writing makes us care about them. I’m not necessarily saying that facts and statistics are unnecessary. On the contrary. They are integral to framing the issue in a quantitative manner that allows for objective situational comparisons. Qualitative illustrations are just as important, though, as they tap our human emotions and elicit a kind of response that no numbers ever could. Numbers are important for getting our attention and paraphrasing the issue, but faces can get us to ponder deeply about what it means for ourselves and for our fellow individuals.
Deeply Rooted, Laura Hamilton *** / 3 of 5 stars
Enjoyable Reading: 5/5
Applicable to Business: 2/5
Behavioral Insight: 2/5
There, that’s it, that’s Deeply Rooted. If you choose to pick up this visual, emotional, well-written book by Lisa Hamilton, that’s what you’ll find. Perhaps her background as a photographer coupled with her writing experience produced a book that is more a series of three portraits than a structured narrative. There is no over-arching argument. No heart-wrenching tale of doomed polar bears. No imperatives for the reader about how they should live their lives.
The stories of the three agrarians speak for themselves. Thanks to eloquent writing and a penchant for beautiful – but never superfluous – description, Harry Lewis and Virgil Trujillo and the Podoll family come to life. As we read we feel their struggles and see the insurmountable obstacles they regularly face. We look into the deriding eyes of neighbors wedded to large scale agribusiness and ask ourselves why we keep working so hard to maintain our family farms. Our finances are always just barely allowing us to feed ourselves and keep our roofs over our heads.
The structure depends on successful portraiture for the reader to relate to the characters and empathize; going from line to line of text, the reader must see their own values in that of the Americans depicted and to see something in those lives that is worth… well worth what? Worth saving? Worth protesting in activist circles about? Worth blogging about? Deeply Rooted never explicitly encourages any reader behavior or action, but it is so well written and the lives in it so pulsing with vivacity that the reader feels a deep connection that demands no definition and inspires contemplation. By any judgment, a truly bold and risky approach to writing and selling a book (a review of Coming Home to Eat can be found here and shows how such styles can lead to a poor final product).
And yet such a style might be exactly what the umbrella environmental movement and its subsidiary slow foods initiative need most. The typical arguments behind slow-food and locavore lifestyles can be summed up with three points: the average bite of food in America travels 1,500 miles before entering our mouths; the methods used to produce our food are unsustainable; and individual farmers receive only a tiny fraction of the proceeds garnered in our favorite supermarkets.
Deeply Rooted is an important resource for those seeking a more integrated education on the issues of where our food comes from. Statistics will only get you so far as there are only so many headlines to be made, and many of these numbers and facts are repeated so frequently that any inherent power they once retained becomes heavily eroded. Lisa Hamilton takes a more sophisticated tact with her portraits; there are thousands of individuals with their own struggles and stories, and each one is unique in their power. Deeply Rooted attacks the issue on a deeper level of humanity — here are the faces behind a social dilemma. They are as real as you or me, and Hamilton’s writing makes us care about them. I’m not necessarily saying that facts and statistics are unnecessary. On the contrary. They are integral to framing the issue in a quantitative manner that allows for objective situational comparisons. Qualitative illustrations are just as important, though, as they tap our human emotions and elicit a kind of response that no numbers ever could. Numbers are important for getting our attention and paraphrasing the issue, but faces can get us to ponder deeply about what it means for ourselves and for our fellow individuals.
Deeply Rooted, Laura Hamilton *** / 3 of 5 stars
Enjoyable Reading: 5/5
Applicable to Business: 2/5
Behavioral Insight: 2/5
I heard her on NPR in NYC–I’m still waiting for the book to get here. She was great and I hope the book as as good as I hear it is. She did a talk with Daniel Barber in New York too.