Passion for good, simple, healthy food is something farmers and hunters share with chefs, urban homesteaders and metropolitan diners in these new books about meat and so much more.  It’s become cool to be carnivore. Farmer and evangelist for the grass-fed movement, Joel Salatin’s new book, Folks This Ain’t Normal: A Farmer’s Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World (Hatchette 2011) points out how alienated most people are from the meat they eat. If you’ve never read one of Salatin’s books, you’re missing a distinctive voice with a provocative point of view. He’s got a wicked sense of humor and a storyteller’s knack. This is his first title with a big commercial publisher after years of self-publishing as Polyface. Tamar Adler, An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace (Scribner, 2011), writes essays for the home cook. Inspired by the spirit of M.F.K. Fisher’s How to Cook a Wolf – written in 1942 during wartime shortages – this is a young woman’s account of how to make the most of everything you have including the bones and peels and ends, demonstrating what great chefs don’t want you to know. Part philosophy, part cooking lessons, Tamar Adler writes about boiling water, cooking eggs, using meat and fish resourcefully, and pulling together full meals from empty cupboards. Roasts for every day of the week is the subject of the new book by the authority on soulful French cooking and author of the popular, Pork and Sons. Stephane Reynaud has…

The End of Country is like many other books that have surfaced in the last five or so years on the scarcity of true wilderness and the abuse of natural resources resulting from corporate greed. Seamus McGraw’s story is frightening, even apocalyptic; after all, Nature’s resources are finite. But it needs to be told and, for many residents in Upstate New York like me, its subject is increasingly relevant. “Hydro-fracking” is the hot topic of the Northeast and, as McGraw so emphatically expresses in his first book, anger, fear and desperation make for an explosive climate (pun intended). Whether America likes it or not, hydraulic fracturing is here to stay. We are a nation desperate to eliminate foreign dependency on fuel and yet refuse to reduce our increasingly burdensome need for energy. New sources are imminent and natural gas is slated to provide. Rather than preaching the benefits and perils of natural gas drilling and hydraulic fracturing, McGraw shows the reader its complexity. Glimpsing into McGraw’s family history and delving into the lives of his neighbors, of landowners in Dimock, of historic oil barons and gas innovators, of geologists, and of academics, the reader pulls from the facts and figures a story about individuals who had the dumb luck to own property on top of a natural gas deposit. The Marcellus Shale brings with its wealth a lot of promises, all overshadowed by greed, reluctance, fear, and distrust. There are many players shaping Pennsylvania’s land as well as the future…