In-Person | To Boldly Grow: An Evening with Tamar Haspel & Michael Grunwald

A love-letter to the unexpected delights (and occasional despair) of so-called “first-hand food”—meals we grow, forage, fish, or even hunt from the world around us. To Boldly Grow is “part memoir, part how-to guide and wholly delightful” (Washington Post).

Journalist and self-proclaimed “crappy gardener” Tamar Haspel is on a mission: to show us that raising or gathering our own food is not as hard as it’s often made out to be. When she and her husband move from Manhattan to two acres on Cape Cod, they decide to adopt a more active approach to their diet: raising chickens, growing tomatoes, even foraging for mushrooms and hunting their own meat. They have more ambition than practical know-how, but that’s not about to stop them from trying…even if sometimes their reach exceeds their (often muddy) grasp.

With “first-hand food” as her guiding principle, Haspel embarks on a grand experiment to stop relying on experts to teach her the ropes (after all, they can make anything grow), and start using her own ingenuity and creativity. Some of her experiments are a rousing success (refining her own sea salt). Others are a spectacular failure (the turkey plucker engineered from an old washing machine). Filled with practical tips and hard-won wisdom, To Boldly Grow allows us to journey alongside Haspel as she goes from cluelessness to competence, learning to scrounge dinner from the landscape around her and discovering that a direct connection to what we eat can utterly change the way we think about our food--and ourselves.

Tamar Haspel writes the James Beard Award-winning Washington Post column Unearthed, which tackles food from every angle: agriculture, nutrition, obesity, the food environment, and DIY. She’s also written for Discover, National Geographic’s The Plate, Vox, Slate, Eater, Fortune, and Edible Cape Cod.

Michael Grunwald is a best-selling author and a senior writer for POLITICO Magazine, focusing on government policy, especially climate and environmental policy, as well as presidential politics. He has won the George Polk Award for national reporting, the Worth Bingham Prize for investigative reporting, and many other journalism honors.

After growing up on Long Island and graduating from Harvard College, Mike was a staff writer for The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and TIME Magazine before joining POLITICO in November 2014. Mike is the author of two critically acclaimed books, The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise (Simon & Schuster, 2006), which was adapted for a PBS documentary, and The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era (Simon & Schuster, 2012), which spent four weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. He is now working on a new book for Simon & Schuster about how to feed the world without frying the world.

Mike is married to Cristina Dominguez, a lawyer and Aryuvedic counselor. They live in Miami with their son, Max, their daughter, Lina, and their dogs, Cookie and Wags.

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