McMinn - To the Table: a Spirituality of Food, Farming, and Community

Tell me a story and I will care more. Maybe its a personal weakness, but I find it to be true. If you give me someone that I can see, then I can imagine that someone as a family member or a friend or neighbor. Since Im not unique on this point, I asked several people to let me poke into their lives so I could include their stories. Thank you Kim, Sarah, Brandon, Michael, and Brenda for your willingness to entrust me with your stories and thoughts about how you feed your families and bake bread and pastries for your community.

Three women read this manuscript chapter by chapter as I wrote it, affirming, challenging, and responding as people with their own food preparation histories and thoughts on how food, politics, and faith collide and collude. Thank you Pamela Augustine and Carol Sherwood for the time you dedicated to this task, for your openness to these ideas and honest responses. I would like to offer an extra thank-you to Ada LaNeal Miller. Your probing questions and reflective connections and comments made this book better and more true.

Sherry Macy offered to read the manuscript with an editors eye and taught me things that I didnt know about comma use, hyphenation, and other matters that make books read well. Speaking of editing, this book wouldnt have happened if Bob Hosack, my longtime friend, didnt have breakfast with me one morning to listen to how my heart and soul were being engaged and stretched. Im grateful for the risk he took in publishing a book about food and for his encouragement and support throughout the process. The editing of Lisa Cockrel, Jennifer Jantz Estes, and Brian Bolger made it stronger, more precise, and perhaps a little less rhapsodic, as Lisa might say. The behind-the-scenes work of the design team, production team, and marketing team turned words I arranged on the page into the book you hold in your hand. Thanks to all of you at Brazos/Baker.

I cant express adequately how deeply I appreciate Brandon Buerkle partnering with me by providing the illustrations for this book. We talked about what I hoped each chapter would communicate, and hed send me drawings as he finished them. After he texted me the seed picture (so much tiny detail!), I texted back, You make me weep. He responded, Im sorry it was that bad. Ill start over. But he knew what I meant. I weep because his illustrations capture something deeply beautiful; he says in pencil and ink what I am trying to say with words.

Finally, every morning I wake up to a man who is many things to me, in addition to being my husband. Mark is the father of my children, grandfather of our grandchildren, and also my co-farmer, my sous chef, and the head pastry chef in our home. Mark is always my first reader and best critic. He is bold and fearless in his critique and generous with his affirmation, and I love him for that, among other things. Living with him these thirty-six years has shaped me profoundly.