So I know, I know, this is by no means a new book. But I just finished reading it yesterday and wanted to share my thoughts on it.
The book is Plenty: Eating Locally on the 100 Mile Diet and it was written by a Canadian couple, Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon.
It’s a short read, only about 250 pages, and it’s pretty easy to read quickly (which is very desirable when the other things you read are dense textbooks and required academic articles). The chapters lend themselves to short bursts of reading every now and then, so you don’t have to read the entire thing in practically one setting to understand a complex plot or anything like that.
The writing is quite flavorful, full of stories about successful and not-so-successful cooking experiments, strange “exotic” foods growing in one’s own backyard, and the lives of the farmers that Alisa and J.B. work with in order to find an edible variety of foods that would grow within 100 miles of their tiny urban apartment, which eventually becomes filled with all sorts of tubers, root vegetables, canned goods, etc. It was quite pleasant to hear someone talk so beautifully about something we have come to see as mundane, because we are forced to cook (or buy) and eat and deal with it every day, three times a day: food.
The one thing that keeps me from giving this book a more whole-hearted recommendation is the stuff that isn’t about food. Alisa and J.B. spend a lot of time (too much, for my taste) talking to the reader about how their decade-and-a-half-old relationship seems to be crumbling. Alisa especially takes a rather defeatist approach to the subject, and though it wasn’t the focus of the book, her occasional “why didn’t I do something else with my life” regrets really were a downer for me. Sure, I guess it’s an autobiographical book in a sense, but I think the book would’ve been just fine without such melancholy interludes.
All-in-all, I think that if you don’t believe that you are capable of eating for a year off of whatever you can find within a 100 mile radius of your home, you should definitely read this book. Yes, it turns out to be a real pain the butt, but it’s a learning adventure and also leads Alisa and J.B. to some of the finest foods they have ever tasted (and many they had never tasted before). I wouldn’t read it again but I would definitely recommend it for a relaxed and pleasant read!
