The Question of Rootedness
Grace Olmstead’s Uprooted prompts questions about how to support farming communities—and our own, wherever we find ourselves.
Review by Margaret Cross
As we have broken down the chain that connects people to the food on their plates, we have desensitized them to the way in which it is produced. Most consumers no longer know (nor care) whether the farms that produce their foods are healthy.”
I squirmed sheepishly in my chair while reading these lines in Grace Olmstead’s Uprooted. Ironically, or perhaps tellingly, I had just finished unpacking parcels of groceries that someone I will never know had selected for me off the shelves of a local Whole Foods and delivered to my doorstep, in answer to my one-click order. Despite having grown up in a small New Hampshire county peppered with farm stands, horse stables, and picturesque pastures, lately I’ve become exactly the sort of consumer that frustrates Olmstead. Like many of my peers, I’ve evolved—or devolved—into a yuppie who no longer puts the produce I eat into my own shopping cart, let alone spares a thought for where it was harvested. Fortunately, in her first book, the Idaho-born journalist offers me and my fellow urbanites a reality check as she explores the challenged state of the agricultural communities in America’s heartland and urges readers to make personal sacrifices—including resisting the urge to emigrate—to revive such communities.
Using autobiographical vignettes, interviews with farmers, and scientific and historical analyses, Olmstead challenges readers to rethink their apathy toward the land and people to whom they owe their food. She invites the reader to visualize the natural beauty of Emmett, Idaho—the farming town where she grew up—and celebrates the close-knit nature of farming families. She fondly remembers sitting with family members in her backyard and shucking sweetcorn grown especially for them and their neighbors by Olmstead’s beloved great-grandfather, “Grandpa Dad,” who embodies the hardworking, fiercely independent American farmer archetype. Her anecdotes paint a vivid picture of farmers as “humble, fierce, and kind” people possessing “staunch individualism [that] is always tempered by their willingness to bend over backward for someone in need.”
Olmstead entreats readers to remain in and nourish their respective communities of origin, so that the social fabric of those communities does not further deteriorate.
Yet Olmstead tempers her praise of Emmett with lament over the cultural and economic pressures contributing to its decline. She highlights how temporary settlers have chronically damaged Emmett’s environment through unbridled, profit-driven extraction and consumption of its natural resources, and she argues that the USDA’s policies have further harmed farm ecosystems by consolidating America’s food production onto fewer and more industrialized farms. Modern farming practices threaten to irrevocably damage Emmett’s soil, and the associated declines in farming jobs and salaries are costing Emmett its most valuable asset: the younger generation. In search of the prestige and individuality that modern American culture enshrines, bright young people from Emmett and similar rural communities are migrating to coastal cities in droves, as Olmstead herself did. Now residing in Virginia, Olmstead remains haunted by a sense of duty toward Emmett; she views emigration as an existential threat not only to farming towns, but to the food system as a whole, since it leaves behind aging farmers without successors.
Faced with the thorny problem of an unsustainable food system, Olmstead proposes the solution of rootedness: long-term commitment to and stewardship of one’s hometown environment and community. Olmstead invokes Tocqueville’s observations in Democracy in America to argue that Americans ought to prioritize association with others in their local communities through the type of volunteerism and neighborliness she grew up witnessing in Emmett. Such associations might generate positive bonds between young people and their rural hometowns and motivate them to stay and carry on the farming tradition. More broadly, Olmstead entreats readers to remain in and nourish their respective communities of origin, so that the social fabric of those communities does not further deteriorate. Thus, Uprooted attempts to open readers’ eyes not only to the fragility of the agricultural system, but also to the current fragility of rural communities and the duty that people from those communities owe to them.
While not all of us may be destined to stay in one place, we can all make a greater effort to serve those around us and to practice the neighborliness Olmstead extols.
For Christian readers, the stewardship principle that Olmstead advocates will be a familiar one, yet Olmstead broadens its definition by linking it to geographical rootedness, which she elevates as an equally important virtue. But it is not immediately clear that Christianity itself prioritizes geographical rootedness. In fact, chapter 9 of Luke’s Gospel suggests that such rootedness may even impede Christians from following God’s directions; when prospective disciples ask Jesus for time to say goodbye to or bury loved ones, he replies, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.” (Luke 9:57-62). Christianity may not require, nor even endorse, putting down roots on Earth. Instead, it claims that we have all been uprooted from our true, heavenly home. The Christian must embrace rootedness to the extent that it motivates love of neighbor, but not so much as to impede flexibly following where Christ may lead—including away from rural homes.
Olmstead does not explore these nuances in Uprooted; instead, her zeal for geographic rootedness leads her to an overly simplistic conclusion. Because I do not share Olmstead’s affection for my own hometown, I find her suggestion that people, with few exceptions, ought to stay in and improve struggling rural towns both unrealistic and patronizing. Development economist Michael Clemens has pointed out that there is “no serious research in social science to demonstrate that a policy of blocking talented or educated people from leaving any poor neighborhood, poor rural area, or poor nation has ever caused any of those places to develop.” Olmstead’s own reluctance to return to Emmett further demonstrates her conclusion’s untenability, and she never quite reconciles her choice to put down roots in new soil with her criticism of others’ emigration. This tension might be resolved, however, by reframing rootedness as not necessarily geographic, but interpersonal. While not all of us may be destined to stay in one place, we can all make a greater effort to serve those around us and to practice the neighborliness Olmstead extols.
While we may disagree on the answers, I am grateful to Olmstead for raising the questions of what it means to lead a rooted life. Such questions become all the more urgent during the Covid-19 pandemic, which limits opportunities to associate with others and deepen neighborly roots, but also restricts travel and so forces us to engage more deeply with our local environments. Uprooted provides a jumping off point to ask big questions such as: How can we put down roots in an increasingly virtual world? How can we love our neighbor from a social distance, or model the Good Samaritan from six feet away? In what creative ways can we continue, like Emmett’s farmers, to nourish our communities with our first fruits? The world waits for our answers.
Margaret Cross graduated from Dartmouth College in 2019 with a degree in Government and English Literature. She currently resides in Cambridge, MA, where she works as a Research Associate and casewriter at Harvard Business School. She will be attending law school in the fall.
Uprooted: Recovering the Legacy of the Places We’ve Left Behind was published on March 16, 2021 by Sentinel. Fare Forward would like to thank the publisher for providing our reviewer with an advance copy. You can purchase your own copy on their website here.
