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Unpasteurized Inga

Recipes and Reflections on Food, Farming, and Finding Your Way Back

9781969183034
224 pages
Little Creek Press
Overview

This is not just a cookbook. It's a reckoning, a return, and a deeply personal map back to oneself through food, land, and chosen family.

Rooted in rural Wisconsin, this book weaves together intimate personal essays, deeply nourishing recipes, and reflections on farming, friendship, healing, and care. Written from the middle of life—after burnout, boundary-setting, and profound personal change—the narrative moves fluidly between the kitchen and the pasture, between grief and joy, solitude and community.

Alongside recipes meant to ground and sustain—slow-braised meats, broths to sip from a mug, simple salads that restore balance—are stories of rebuilding a life from the inside out. The author reflects on family estrangement, sobriety, nervous-system healing, friendship as reparenting, and the quiet power of feeding oneself well. Celebrates the farmers who supply the food, Inga explains how and why she cooks the way she does, and explores her commitment to grass-based agriculture as both philosophy and practice.

This is a book about learning to listen—to your body, to the land, to what truly nourishes. Honest, grounded, and generous, it invites readers into a slower, more intentional way of living, cooking, and caring.

Author Bio
Inga Orth is a Wisconsin-based writer, cook, licensed Wisconsin cheesemaker, and advocate for grass-based agriculture. Raised on a dairy farm and shaped by years of hands-on work in food, farming, and hospitality, she brings honesty, warmth, and hard-earned perspective to the page. Inga is best known for creating and hosting a long-running television series that celebrated farmers, rural life, and the people who feed us—work that deepened her commitment to storytelling rooted in place and purpose. Her writing explores nourishment beyond the plate: how food, land, friendship, and self-trust can guide us back to wholeness. She lives in rural Wisconsin, where cooking, care, and community remain central to daily life.