Burlington Book Festival 2009

What a great Burlington Book Festival Rick Kisonak hosted this weekend at the Main Street Landing Performing Arts Center, hard by the banks of Lake Champlain. The economy is down, but the climate is improving for the solitary act of reading and the not-so-solitary act of celebrating the written word.

At the festival, I had the privilege of introducing (in this order) authors Ron Krupp, Amanda Boyden, Robin Lippincott, Joseph Boyden, Rita Murphy, the Reverend Gary Kowalski, and Mary Azarian (to whom this year's festival was dedicated).

They're all great talents, but it was the least literary among them — that is, the author better known for what he writes about than for how he writes about it — Ron Krupp, who really captured my imagination.

Krupp, the author of The Woodchuck's Guide to Gardening, is promoting his new self-published book, Lifting the Yolk: Local Solutions to America's Farm and Food Crisis, and he shared with his audience some startling insights on how the typical North American diet, and our general ignorance about where our food comes from, is affecting our health. He noted that, when Robert Kennedy visited the Deep South in the 1960s, he observed malnutrition and lots of skinny people. Today, Krupp said, he'd find malnourished obese people. Some 25% of U.S. four-year-olds are obese, he added, citing a government report. Whoa. He said he hired a Canadian printer to print his latest book because it was less expensive up there. Why is it so much less expensive to print a book in Canada than on this side of the border? "Health care," Krupp said.

I immediately thought of all the U.S. businesses—large and small—that can't compete with foreign ventures because the cost of doing business in this country, part of which is the health-care cost, is so high. Sure, taxes are part of that nut. But if less-expensive health-care options were available in this country—for employers as well as for employees—wouldn't that stimulate the economy? It's all of a piece. Krupp was talking about growing food, but the same free-market forces that make cheap-but-not-that-nutritious food the rule, not the exception, are also creating expensive health-care options for a nation of people whose diet drives us to need care. Brilliant.

I took my typical Vermonter pride in Krupp's observation that, despite representing 1/500th of the U.S. population, Vermont leads the country in community supported agriculture (CSA), farmers markets, and craft beer. (I could go on about all the "livability" awards Vermont and Burlington have won over the past couple of years, but I won't.)

I left Krupp's talk with my head spinning—but in a good way.