Natural Resources (The Radical Joys of Food, Cooking, and Care in Unsteady Times)

From James Beard Award finalist and bestselling author of The Editor, Sara B. Franklin, a poignant essay collection exploring how food, cooking, and gardening shape our daily lives and worldviews, and strengthen, in times of upheaval, our resilience and grit.

In Natural Resources, Sara B. Franklin offers a profound and sensory-rich exploration of what it means to connect, care, and survive in an increasingly fractured world. Moving away from the manufactured aspirations of consumer culture and fine dining, Franklin elevates the workaday and the overlooked—from a humble head of cabbage to a backyard strawberry patch—as powerful metaphors for building a meaningful life. Written against the backdrop of a divorce, the pandemic, and the bewildering grief of losing her parents, Franklin finds grounding and life-affirming joy in the everyday rhythms of food.

Through a series of ten intimately linked essays, each centered around a specific dish or ingredient, she shares moments of profound vulnerability—like secretly driving into the mountains to forage for wild ramps, or the bittersweet ache of teaching her young twins how to cook eggs, releasing them into a world fraught with political and ecological crises—while providing valuable lessons about living through fraught times. Through chapters dedicated to commonplace foods like zucchini, tomatoes, and soup, Franklin illustrates how everyday cooking offers an antidote to late-capitalist burnout. Complete with approachable, restorative recipes, Natural Resources serves as a balm, proving that the world truly begins, and is sustained, wherever food is made and shared.