Books Show the Way How to Live Simply, with Pleasure

Eating locally and in season wasn鈥檛 a fad during Mary Beth Lind鈥檚 childhood in rural West Virginia. It was just the way things worked. Her mother grew a large garden, and her father, a doctor, sometimes accepted vegetables as payment from his patients.

鈥淵ou just learned to live with what you have,鈥 says Lind, who graduated from 91短视频 in 1972 with a degree in home economics.

Lind, now a registered dietitian, later earned a graduate degree in nutrition from Oregon State University and returned briefly to 91短视频 to teach home economics in 1980.

In 2005, Lind drew on her professional expertise and personal experience to write Simply In Season (Herald Press), a cookbook arranged by season with an emphasis on fresh and local foods. Lind co-wrote the book with a Goshen College graduate, Cathleen Hockman-Wert.

鈥淭hat whole sense of eating locally and seasonally [that I grew up with] was what was so important about Simply In Season,鈥 said Lind. She hopes the book will help broaden the horizons of recent generations of home cooks who don鈥檛 鈥渒now where their food comes from other than the supermarket, [and] who want to support the local,聽seasonal聽food economy but聽to whom it is not part of their heritage.鈥

A decade before Simply In Season鈥檚 publication, Lind and her sister, Sarah Myers (class of 鈥67) co-wrote Recipes from the Old Mill: Baking With Whole Grains (Good Books, 1995), inspired by childhood memories of their uncle, who ran a water-powered grain mill in West Virginia.

Herald Press celebrated the 30th anniversary of a kindred bestseller, Living More with Less, with last year鈥檚 release of a new edition edited and expanded by Valerie Weaver-Zercher 鈥94. Living More with Less was originally written by Doris Janzen Longacre, who died of cancer just before completing her manuscript (her husband, with three others, ushered it into publication). Longacre had previously written the bestselling More-with-Less Cookbook (Herald Press, 1976 & 2000) 鈥 860,000 copies sold by 2010, including British and German editions 鈥 which provided inspiration for Lind and Hockman-Wert鈥檚 Simply in Season.