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coraaPlenty: Eating Locally on the 100-Mile Diet
, by Alisa Smith and J.B. Mackinnon
Plenty is written along the same lines as Animal, Vegetable, Miracle -- they only eat things that were produced within a certain radius of them, in this case 100 miles -- with two differences: the authors are in British Columbia (not too far from me, actually), and they don't 'cheat' at all. Where Kingsolver's family had some exceptions from the rule, Smith and Mackinnon don't 'cheat' at all -- if it's not grown or raised within a hundred miles, they don't eat it.
This was a really uneven read. Parts of it were amazing, and I loved the inspiration for eating locally myself. (Since they're from BC, the things they eat at various parts of the year are very similar to the things I eat at the same parts of the year.) I was entertained by their frustration -- very much like mine! -- with late winter/early spring, where they ate potato pancakes, more potato pancakes, still more potato pancakes. And some of the things they ate sounded both delicious and possible for me to cook -- and I was delighted by the acknowledgment that shucking, steaming, and de-kerneling ten pounds of corncobs is kind of a pain-in-the-ass job.
On the other hand, there was some serious unevenness. Right after the chapter about potatoes potatoes oh god please no more potatoes, there was a rather smug bit where the husband was like, 'hard? it's not that hard! it's easy!', which was... sort of contradictory (and a little overly pleased-with-self). (Indeed, while I did like the eating-locally stuff, the smugness made me roll my eyes -- yes, it's very nice that you can spend a full month living in the back end of nowhere in a house with no power gathering berries, but it's easy to sound painfully superior about it.) And there was a lot of 'marriage in trouble!' stuff that I found frankly uninteresting and skimmed in search of more writing about food. (I'm probably going to convince you all that I hate memoirs, and that's not true at all. I like memoirs! I just have very short patience with middle-class ennui.)
I definitely think this one's worth reading, especially if you're a person in the Pacific Northwest interested in eating locally. There are just some parts that I thought lent themselves more to skimming.
Running Tally:
Total Books: 21
Fiction: 7
Non-Fiction: 14
POC Author: 6
, by Alisa Smith and J.B. MackinnonPlenty is written along the same lines as Animal, Vegetable, Miracle -- they only eat things that were produced within a certain radius of them, in this case 100 miles -- with two differences: the authors are in British Columbia (not too far from me, actually), and they don't 'cheat' at all. Where Kingsolver's family had some exceptions from the rule, Smith and Mackinnon don't 'cheat' at all -- if it's not grown or raised within a hundred miles, they don't eat it.
This was a really uneven read. Parts of it were amazing, and I loved the inspiration for eating locally myself. (Since they're from BC, the things they eat at various parts of the year are very similar to the things I eat at the same parts of the year.) I was entertained by their frustration -- very much like mine! -- with late winter/early spring, where they ate potato pancakes, more potato pancakes, still more potato pancakes. And some of the things they ate sounded both delicious and possible for me to cook -- and I was delighted by the acknowledgment that shucking, steaming, and de-kerneling ten pounds of corncobs is kind of a pain-in-the-ass job.
On the other hand, there was some serious unevenness. Right after the chapter about potatoes potatoes oh god please no more potatoes, there was a rather smug bit where the husband was like, 'hard? it's not that hard! it's easy!', which was... sort of contradictory (and a little overly pleased-with-self). (Indeed, while I did like the eating-locally stuff, the smugness made me roll my eyes -- yes, it's very nice that you can spend a full month living in the back end of nowhere in a house with no power gathering berries, but it's easy to sound painfully superior about it.) And there was a lot of 'marriage in trouble!' stuff that I found frankly uninteresting and skimmed in search of more writing about food. (I'm probably going to convince you all that I hate memoirs, and that's not true at all. I like memoirs! I just have very short patience with middle-class ennui.)
I definitely think this one's worth reading, especially if you're a person in the Pacific Northwest interested in eating locally. There are just some parts that I thought lent themselves more to skimming.
Running Tally:
Total Books: 21
Fiction: 7
Non-Fiction: 14
POC Author: 6
