When I was growing up, I thought gardening and preserving food were pursuits most suited for old ladies in calico dresses. Kneading bread and making jam ranked right up there with threshing wheat, when it came to activities I would ever picture myself engaging in. I never took a home-ec class in school, because I had more interesting things with which to fulfill my elective options. In high school and college, when my friends and I pictured our futures, the words "pressure canner" and "compost pile" never once came up in our discussions. They were not at all a part of what I pictured the life of a modern woman would include.

Flash forward 10 years to today, where I just spent an entire morning with the other women in my MOPS group listening to a fellow young woman dressed up in very hip argyle tights and turquoise jewelry teach us about food preserving. I never would have imagined that at age 29, my peers and I would be intrigued by an hour of discussion on pectin and pressure gauges, but there we were--a dozen intelligent, informed, capable women, all nodding our heads and taking notes and sharing our home-canning adventures.



This outburst of interest in home-grown, home-cooked, home-preserved food isn't just something that stay-at-home moms with too much time on their hands are obsessed with either. I have childless friends who work all day and come home at night to garden, who hit the farmer's market every weekend to get the best produce and then come home and cook delicious meals. Look at Molly Wizenberg. She's a 30ish food blogger who has degrees in biology, French, and anthropology, but has now made a career out of writing about food full time. She's young, she's educated, she's urban--and she's all about home cooking. Her new book (which I haven't read yet) is called A Homemade Life, and it's a best-seller.

I think that title says it all. We live in such an ephemeral, digital world. We communicate with our friends and families through e-mails and texts and Facebook messages. Our family photographs are all on the computer screen. So much of what we see and hear and buy is slick, mass-produced, and perfect.

It's in reaction to that, I believe, that my generation is reaching out for that homemade life. There are other reasons, too--we're all conscious of being green, these days, aren't we?--and something you made or grew yourself, or purchased from a local farmer, is supposedly better for the world than something grown in Mexico and shipped across the continent and purchased from a national chain grocer. I also think that the homemade revival has something to do with nostalgia, with a certain amount of reaching out for childhood memories and comfort.

But when it comes down to it, I think the main reason the women (and men) of my generation find ourselves putting on our grandmothers' aprons is the craving for something real. The dirt on your fingers when you plant a seed. The smell of bread baking in the kitchen. The tomatoes that maybe aren't as big and plump and red as the ones at the grocery store, but that taste so sweet because you grew them yourself. Look at the crafting revival, the growth of Etsy, the fascination with everything from vintage clothes to hand-made soap. My generation loves our digital music, our streaming video, our highspeed Internet, but we also love things that can't be manufactured or mass-produced or imitated. We want the real stuff. We want the homemade life.

It's April, and today the rain is pouring down outside and the little seedlings in my garden are poking their tiny green shoots out of the soil, and I'm watching them with affection every day. I've got my canning pot on the shelf and empty jars in my cupboard. I can't wait to start picking and slicing and cooking again.

I'm a modern woman. Just watch me grow.