A few years before she died, I returned with my mother to her family home in West Virginia. Hotels and spas now line the once-sleepy main road through Berkeley Springs, which was first named Bath for the natural hot springs that George Washington frequented. The town is nestled among rolling hills not far from Harpers Ferry, where John Brown tried to spark a slave revolt, and where a key Civil War battle was fought in 1862. During the war, West Virginia’s small farmers broke off from Virginia and sided with the Union—not purely as a principled stand against slavery, but as a reaction against the rule of the eastern tidewater plantation owners who, because they could count their slaves’ three-fifths votes, controlled the state legislature. (West Virginia’s biggest war hero, canonized with a large statue in Charleston, was the Confederate general Stonewall Jackson.) In the Berkeley Springs town square stands a memorial for more recent war veterans, and a couple dozen share my family’s surnames. Across the street in the city museum I found labels from my great-grandparents’ small tomato-canning factory.

If you climb the highest hill above Berkeley Springs, you can see across the Potomac to Pennsylvania and Maryland. Beginning in the 17th century, the Quakers’ tolerant religious policies made Pennsylvania a popular entry point for new immigrants—English, Scots-Irish, and Germans. When the rich farmlands of southern Pennsylvania were claimed, they continued south, settling on the east side of the Appalachian Mountains to the Carolinas. For at least ten generations, they grew vegetables and grain and fruit, harvesting timber as they cleared the land for farming. When my mother was a girl, she and her brothers and cousins helped pick and core the apples, feed the chickens, and stir the huge iron pot used to render the fat of slaughtered pigs.

Then came the Great Depression. My grandfather left Berkeley Springs with the family to seek work as a steelworker, laborer, or carpenter—first in nearby Pennsylvania, and later as far away as Texas. A way of life, a line of family farmers stretching back to the river bottomlands of Europe, was broken. When my mother was 16, she ran away to San Francisco.

My family moved several times, but as long as I knew her, Mom would drive to local farms to collect fresh eggs or garden vegetables. When I was old enough, she taught me to cook. For a short time, we lived on a farm in southern Missouri that she loved. I didn’t. I remember walking down our half-mile gravel driveway to a neighbor’s house to watch The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. Television offered up a different way of life, and expanding college enrollment made it possible. I couldn’t wait to leave for the city. As I learned on a recent visit, the same desire drives millions of sons and daughters of Chinese peasants off the land.

On our last trip to West Virginia, my mother and I drove by my great-grandparents’ farm, the remains of the tomato cannery in nearby Sleepy Creek, and the log house where she was born. She spoke of her childhood with a mix of nostalgia and regret, tinged with anger. In the past century, as the farms and small towns across America have emptied into cities and suburbs, our alienation from the agrarian life of prior generations seems nearly complete. I don’t want to go back. But still I pay for heirloom varieties because I yearn for the sweetness of my grandmother’s tomatoes.

The power of the so-called New Ruralism, which hopes to re-integrate city and country life, is the knowledge that the food we eat is flavored with our histories and cultures. In California, as Andrew Lam writes, those thrillingly collide on our tongues. But organic farms, communitysupported agriculture, farmers’ markets, and now experimental mixed-use urban greenbelts remain boutique—a small percentage of an agricultural industry that effectively deals in crop yields. If New Ruralism is to grow, it must grapple with the dynamics of scale, and accept that few of us want to return to the farm. But New Ruralism does tap another potent desire, for a future that tastes of our ancestral homes.