Eating locally and in season wasn’t a fad during Mary Beth Lind’s 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.
“You just learned to live with what you have,” says Lind, who graduated from EMU 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 EMU 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.
“That whole sense of eating locally and seasonally [that I grew up with] was what was so important about Simply In Season,” said Lind. She hopes the book will help broaden the horizons of recent generations of home cooks who don’t “know where their food comes from other than the supermarket, [and] who want to support the local, seasonal food economy but to whom it is not part of their heritage.”
A decade before Simply In Season’s publication, Lind and her sister, Sarah Myers (class of ’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’s release of a new edition edited and expanded by Valerie Weaver-Zercher ’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) – 860,000 copies sold by 2010, including British and German editions – which provided inspiration for Lind and Hockman-Wert’s Simply in Season.