Plenty

This week I enjoyed "Plenty", Alisa Smith and JB Mackinnon's account of eating locally for a year. I think the only reason I didn't read it when it first came out was because Barbara Kingsolver's "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" came out at around the same time, and I try not to read books with similar themes too closely together.

It did take me a while to warm up to this one, maybe because it's the third book I've read over the past few years about a year of eating locally. (The other one was Gary Paul Nabhan's "Coming Home to Eat.") Even though I keep picking up these books, part of me has a problem with the idea of setting out on a self-imposed odyssey, and then writing about its hardships.

It's not that I have anything against eating locally-I'm all about eating locally. It just doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing thing. We're fortunate to be able to get olive oil, salt, chocolate and coffee from other places. The real problem with our food system is that we're shipping items like potatoes and lettuce, which grow nearly everywhere. Still, the heroic all-or-nothing thing makes a better story. Never mind that every one of these books--and every strictly local diet I've ever heard of--includes a list of caveats.

As someone who spends a lot of time around local foods, I found some of the couple's revelations early in the book kind of tedious, like when they discover the wonders of their local farmers' market. But eventually I realized that this was a very different book from the other two I had read. In "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle," Kingsolver deliberately moves her family across the country to a place where they can grow their own food. She already knows how to garden, can vegetables, and even make cheese. Gary Paul Nabhan is a ethno-botanist, so he has connections that help him find local foods. But these guys just decided it would be cool to try this out, plunged in, and learned as they went along.

I most enjoyed what the book taught me about the Pacific Northwest, which is my bioregion as well. It painted a rich picture of this landscape's bounty, and also gave me a strong sense of how much has been lost.