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Kousha Navidar: This is All Of It. I'm Kousha Navidar, in for Alison Stewart, and now, we'll turn to a new memoir about the unseen and underappreciated work that puts food on everyone's tables, we're talking about farming, and the even more unseen, unpaid, and underappreciated work that goes into being a farmer's spouse. The "indoor work" as my next guest calls it, of often raising the kids, keeping the family fed and healthy, the emotional labor that often falls to women when farms fall on hard times.

A new memoir, called The Farmer's Wife: My Life in Days, brings us into the day-to-day of that work, its challenges as well as what makes it all worthwhile. Helen Rebanks grew up in a farming family and wanted a different kind of life until she met James, the man who would become her husband. They decided that they missed the agrarian lifestyle and returned to his family's sheep farm to run it and raise their family.

The book documents the everyday struggles of farmers today and celebrates the connection that this lifestyle fosters between the land, the hands that work it, and the food that nourishes the world. Joining us in studio, we're lucky to have Helen Rebanks, author of the new memoir, The Farmer's Wife, and Nick Offerman, a carpenter, outdoorsman, Helen and James's friend, and occasional farmhand, and I'm pretty sure he acts too, sometimes. Helen, Nick, thanks for joining us today.

Nick Offerman: Thank you for having us.

Helen Rebanks: Yes, thank you.

Kousha Navidar: Absolutely. Thank you so much for this book. Helen, you write that when you were young, you remember being anxious to leave farm life. Can you tell us what life was like growing up, for you? I think especially what you understood as a younger person about the kind of life you and your family had versus other ways of living.

Helen Rebanks: Well, we certainly didn't have any trips to New York when I was a kid. It was very much centered around the cattle and the sheep. My dad milks dairy cows, and we lamb sheep. My mom and my grandma did a lot of the indoor work. We ran a bed and breakfast in the farmhouse and looked after lots of visitors. It was tough for them. There was a lot of responsibilities on their shoulders.

I definitely wanted to escape that when I was a teenager. Went off to art college. Loved studying English as well, at school. Love making things, thinking about the world, and just wanting to create pieces of work. Then I met James, and, as you said in the intro there, love changes all sorts of things, doesn't it? [laughs]

Kousha Navidar: Sure it does. Yes. [laughs]

Helen Rebanks: I find myself now living very much like my grandma, my mom, doing all they're doing with family life, and keeping this farm going. We run it as a team together. I think I didn't really feel like my life was represented in many books. I read an awful lot. I love memoirs. I love getting to know somebody's story. I think stories connect us deeply to other people and can help us build empathy in these troubled times. I wanted to share my story. Here we are now.

Kousha Navidar: One of the elements that I think made me connect to this book a lot were the recipes, which I thought was interesting, because this is a straight-up memoir, but you infuse it with-- You'll excuse the pun, you infuse it with recipes throughout. One of the first ones that caught my attention were overnight oats because I eat those literally every single day. Love the Greek yogurt insert that you had in that one. Why are these recipes and stories about foods such a key part of your experience that you wanted to include them?

Helen Rebanks: My life, it revolves around what we're going to eat, and family meals around the table, where we come together, all the time. From morning to night, it's breakfast, lunch, and supper at the farmhouse. We need good food to sustain us. When I started writing, I thought I would do a collection of recipes that I would pass on to the kids so they wouldn't have to ring me up when they left home, if they ever leave home, to ask me, "How do you make this, mom? How long do you cook this for?" Et cetera.

It started with the recipes, and then the storytelling, around the edges, became the memoir that it is. A really deep, personal reflection on why I was living this life, and why I'm incredibly proud to do it, but all centers on food. All of those recipes dotted through the book-- It's a real eclectic mix of things, from shakshouka to marmalade, shortbread, or sausage rolls, but things that I rely on that can feed us all, sustain us when we're doing the work outside, and Nick comes along, on his any time off, helps out on the farm, and helps in the kitchen.

Kousha Navidar: Nick, how did you first come to find yourself at the Rebanks' table? What's your favorite dish you've had with them over the years?

Nick Offerman: Oh, gosh. Well, I am a big fan of the writer Wendell Berry, and agrarian thought in general. He's a hero. He's a Kentucky farmer and prolific writer. I grew up in-- half my family are still farmers in Illinois. I was predisposed, within work ethic and a set of values, that Berry's message really appealed to me when he asked the simple questions of, "Do you know where your food comes from? Do you know what you're feeding yourself and your families? Is it healthy for us and for Mother Nature, or is it a corporate product?"

I said, "Holy cow, I really want to know the answers to this." My interest in that subject matter led me to-- Among other things, Helen's husband, James, had a book called The Shepherd's Life, and he was doing a tour. He did an event with Wendell Berry. I got wind of it on Twitter. If you want to meet a nice farming family from the Lakes district in England, I recommend Twitter. We became friends.

We were a similar breed of smartass, and we hit it off, to the point where I was filming a TV show in Manchester, in northwest England, not far from the Rebanks, I went to visit them, and immediately just said, "Oh, I'm going to adopt myself into your family, if that's okay."

Kousha Navidar: [laughs] No option.

Nick Offerman: It was taking the values and work ethic that I grew up with, the heartwarming-- I don't know, I don't want to say country lifestyle, because I think that this warm family eating dinner around the table is available to everybody, no matter how urban or not, it is. I just immediately knew what to do. I said, "Oh, this is incredible, the setting, but I can help split the firewood, I can do the dishes, and I want to be part of the efforts here, to make a beautiful life out of what you can grow on this land."

We just hit it off. They've been very generous with me. Everything that comes out onto the table, from Helen's kitchen-- She has an incredible help. Part of the magic of their household is that all the kids pitch in. They're all great cooks in their own right. To answer your question, of my favorite dish-- It's hard to pick but the first thing that springs to mind is this butter chicken recipe that I've had a lot of. Probably the hero, for me, in the book, is the sausage roll. The Cumbrian sausage roll.

It's ubiquitous in that part of England, kind of like a hot dog at a 7-Eleven in America, but people consider it, I think, a very working-class snack. To me, it is the most gorgeous and elevated food item. It's homemade sausage wrapped in a pastry shell. That's on one end of the spectrum, and on the other end, there's a proper roast, with roast beef, Yorkshire puddings, mashed potatoes, and gravy. Can we take a break real quick? I'm going to have to go get a sandwich. [laughs]

Kousha Navidar: [laughs] Helen, we got a kitchen. That butter chicken got a laugh out of you. Why is that?

Helen Rebanks: Oh, when I was writing the book, everybody thought, "Oh, mom's going to be testing out all these recipes, all this wonderful food all the time," but no, mom was upstairs, working at the desk, on the computer, and butter chicken became a meal that I just relied on. It's like a curry sauce with chicken. [laughs] Now the kids are like, "Oh, no, mom. We're having that again?"

Kousha Navidar: That's funny.

Helen Rebanks: Yes. That's where that laugh comes from.

Nick Offerman: It is very delicious, by the way, but it's a household joke, that while mom was writing the delicious recipe book, she didn't have time to make the delicious recipes, so it's butter chicken tonight.

Kousha Navidar: The great irony. Listeners, if you're just joining us, we're talking with Helen Rebanks, who's the author of The Farmer's Wife. It's out now. We're also talking to Nick Offerman, longtime friend, occasional farmhand, carpenter, outdoorsman, actor. Helen, what was interesting to me, especially in this book, was that you wrote you were set apart from the other kids in your town, because, "I'm weird and snooty anyway, marked out by my maroon blazer, A-level aspirations, and unspoken but obvious desire to leave this town."

What did that Helen not yet know about the world, or about herself, that you would come to understand later on, or when you decided you did want to do something like the agrarian life you grew up with.

Helen Rebanks: When I was growing up, all the messages for young women were, "Go out and live this shiny lifestyle, get this education, go and do something independent, and work outside the home." I definitely was influenced by all of that. Ally McBeal, that lawyer TV series was on the T-- There was girl bosses all the time. It was girl bands in the UK, telling you girls absolutely can do everything and anything they want to do. I thought, "Oh, this is great."

Then I bumped up against the real life of that when I moved down to Oxford to live with James when he was studying. I did lots of different jobs and tried lots of different things, and nothing was fitting, nothing was feeling satisfying, nothing was making me feel fulfilled, I guess, until I got a cafe job to pay the bills, really, because I was bumping up against rejection after rejection when I was applying for different jobs and things.

I worked in this cafe and they were serving these cakes that were wrapped in plastic on the counter. They were all prepackaged, made in a factory, et cetera, not very much taste, and looked quite often dry. I said, "I could bake some cakes here, and make a bit of more money on the side of working in the cafe." They basically turned our little kitchen into a bit of a [laughs] production site and made coffee cakes, date slices, flapjacks, and chocolate brownies, and supplied this cafe.

One thing led to another, we moved back home after that, and I continued to do the food. We started a family. I think when we got married, I realized, just looking around the room that night, that all of our family was around us, celebrating us getting together, and that we were part of a community whereas we weren't in the city. Yes. We'd lived quite a different life.

Kousha Navidar: Yes. That element of community, I think, is really important. It reminds me of Wendell Berry, Nick, that you brought up, this idea of being connected to the food that nourishes you. I understand you might have brought a poem with us to read, from Wendell Berry.

Nick Offerman: I have. I'm moved by Helen's origin story that we just heard. Like one of the Avengers, that she discovered her superpower, the artistry of providing sustenance. No matter what your life path brings to you, that's something that we all-- Wendell Berry says, eating itself is an agricultural act. If you eat, then you should care about this conversation, because most of us are unaware of what is unhealthy and what we're buying at the store. It's true of all of our natural resources.

We give our agency to these corporations and say, "Here's my money. I trust you're going to be cool when you're creating the electricity you send me." We've learned not everybody is cool, it turns out. People are more interested in profits than in the nutrition of your loaf of bread, your eggs, or what have you. The ethos of Wendell Berry runs through a lot of this subject matter, which makes me so grateful to be here, acting as a cheerleader for Helen and her book. Here, for example, is a very powerful poem from Wendell Berry, called Questionnaire.

How much poison are you willing to eat for the success of the free market and global trade?

Please name your preferred poisons.

For the sake of goodness, how much evil are you willing to do?

Fill in the following blanks with the names of your favorite evils and acts of hatred.

What sacrifices are you prepared to make for culture and civilization?

Please list the monuments, shrines, and works of art you would most willingly destroy.

In the name of patriotism and the flag, how much of our beloved land are you willing to desecrate?

List in the following spaces, the mountains, rivers, towns, farms you could most readily do without.

State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes, the energy sources, the kinds of security, for which you would kill a child.

Name, please, the children whom you would be willing to kill.

Kousha Navidar: Thank you for that. Helen, we're talking about this memoir of yours that is about your life, both before you decided to enter the agrarian community and after. Listening to that poem that Nick just read, what comes up for you? Maybe, how would you recommend people change their habits to appreciate the underpaid, unsung work that goes into this?

Helen Rebanks: It's a powerful poem, isn't it? It actually stops you in your tracks. How are we living? What are we choosing to feed our families? How are we caring for each other? All that important work and the choices we have, it brings up so much. It's deep, it's moving, it's powerful. For me, through the memoir, I wanted to celebrate the unsung heroes. It's about my mom, my grandma, the invisible army of women that keep things going, and how important that work is.

Let's celebrate that because sitting around having a meal around the table. There's so much quiet power in the choices that we make, whatever we're choosing has an impact on the land and our health. We can all have a say in that, with how we spend our money, and we're all up against it, because it's tough right now, isn't it, in this economic climate, to make these choices?

I think if we try and get back to basics of simple broths, stews, and nourishing meals, using basic ingredients, where we know where it's come from, meat, fish, vegetables, and some pulses and grains, to nourish ourselves and look after this precious land that we've got-- I think we just see ourselves on the farm as custodians for the future, to pass it on in better health.

We're trying to farm in a regenerative way, that cares about the soil, the rivers, the hedgerows, all the nature that thrives on our farm, because of the practice-- We're taking the chemicals away, yes, and just trying to pass it on in better health for the future.

Kousha Navidar: Yes. If you want to see an example of that life in which folks are custodians of their community and of the earth that they live on, check out The Farmer's Wife. We've been here with Helen Rebanks, who's author of that memoir, and Nick Offerman, the carpenter, outdoorsman, occasional farm hand, also does acting here and there. Helen, Nick, thank you so much for joining us today.

Nick Offerman: Thank you. Can I just offer one more tidbit?

Kousha Navidar: 10 seconds.

Nick Offerman: You're welcome to cut-- All right, if we're wrapping it up. I just want to say that that's a very intense poem, but there's also a lot of joy in this life. Here's just a bit from the book-- How can you resist this gorgeous book? This is instruction number four under Yorkshire Puddings. Take the hot pan out of the oven, being mindful not to spill the fat, and carefully fill each cup half full with cold batter. It should sizzle and bubble as it hits the oil.

Kousha Navidar: Thank you so much. There's an event tonight, I understand, that you want to plug? [crosstalk]

Helen Rebanks: That's right. [crosstalk]

Helen Rebanks: There certainly is. Nick and I will be at the-- It's hosted by Word Bookstore and Ascension Church?

Nick Offerman: That's right. It is Church of the Ascension, in Brooklyn, New York.

Kousha Navidar: Wonderful. That's tonight. Nick Offerman, Helen Rebanks, thank you so much for joining us. Really appreciate it.

Helen Rebanks: Thank you.

Nick Offerman: Thank you so much.

Helen Rebanks: Thank you.

 

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