Lentil Underground

April 20, 2015
In this thoroughly researched debut, Carlisle explores her realization that "American farmers weren't actually growing food, but rather, raw ingredients for big food processors." She sets off to work for Sen. Jon Tester, who was an organic farmer from her own home state of Montana, and subsequently pursues a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley's Department of Geography. Her work eventually leads her to Dave Oien, who with his business Timeless Seeds had become the first organic lentil farmer in his Montana county, selling specialty lentils at Whole Foods and to chefs who served them at fine restaurants. Carlisle's searches for answers to her central questionâ"How could we feed the world without destroying it?"âis reminiscent of the works of Michael Pollan (who mentored the author) and Susan Orlean. Carlisle merges high-stakes material with lovely, descriptive prose, training her sharp eye on the issue of sustainable farming as seen through a small handful of compelling characters, including Oien and other members of the "Lentil Underground," Timeless Seeds's farmers. This book delivers their stories to a wider audience, and will appeal to readers interested in food, farming, and the politics of sustainable agriculture.

December 1, 2014
Former country music singer/songwriter and newly minted geography doctorate student Carlisle unearths the secret history of a rogue posse of organic farmers operating deep in rural Montana.Readers might be understandably reluctant to take in more than 300 pages of in-depth reportage about the emergence of legumes as a practical food product, but take a chance on this dive in to an eccentric niche of the American farm industry-it has a strange attraction, especially for foodies, business innovators and entrepreneurs. The book tells the story of Dave Oien, a farming legacy who returned home in 1976 with inspirations from the teachings of Black Elk and plans to bring solar energy to his family farm. By the mid-1980s, Oien was obsessed with the radical notion of growing organic lentils instead of the traditional crops favored by his fellow farmers. Long before they became the darling of Whole Foods chefs, Oien figured out that lentils "fix" their own nitrogen, converting it to ammonia, which is a critical element in allowing plants to grow-all without the poisonous chemicals used in growing other crops. Joining together with five other forward-thinking farmers, Oien formed Timeless Natural Food and eventually figured out a way to grow edible lentils and other organic products. The remainder of the book covers Oien's transformation from a simple organic farmer to a kind of pied piper for the organic foods movement, inspiring farm improvement clubs, riding the wave of the new American appetite for inspiring new foodstuffs, and eventually dragging chefs, politicos, scientists and other farmers around to his way of thinking. "This lentil harvest is no fairytale success, but a complicated saga of adaptation, learning, and even some tragedy," writes Carlisle. "The story of Timeless seeds is not a heroic one, but then again these fragile plains are not a place that needs heroes." A nimble story about how one man's revolutionary ideas changed the way we eat.

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