Julie Gritten

Julie Gritten, when she was a student, pretended to have goats. She collected spoiled fruit and vegetables from greengrocer under the pretext of wanting to feed her imaginary goats, but instead made preserves and pickles that she sold at a local wholefood shop. In 1974, she earned a bachelor’s degree in botany, which she employed to raise several children in a steadily deescalating regime of alternative living that gradually settled into a pleasant equilibrium of gardening, yoga, prenatal classes, child rearing, and eventually grandchild rearing. Today, she lives on a small organic farm in the beautiful mountains of Eryri, Gwynedd (Snowdonia), northwest Wales, where she feeds hordes of hungry humans.