Book 40: Plenty
Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally
by Alisa Smith and J. B. MacKinnon
Another engaging book that follows a local eating for one year experiment. In this case, it was a Vancouver, BC couple, and they chose to define "local" as food items from within a 100-mile radius of their urban home. The couple takes turns writing the chronological chapters, and really lets the reader into the personal parts of the story. I also liked that Vancouver is close enough to Seattle that their version of local sounds a lot like mine. The couple also explored local native foods to a degree - salmon (of course), high bush cranberries, and kelp, for example.* And found a source for Bigleaf Maple syrup!
While they did have a small in-city garden, they were not able to grow much of their food themselves, unlike Barbara Kingsolver's experiment. They got to know nearby farmers and fishmongers, ate a lot of potatoes and fresh greens, picked a lot of berries, searched and searched for 100-mile wheat, and were very grateful for a number of good local vineyards. They spent a month of the summer in a remote northern BC cabin and foraged quite a bit of their food and they learned to make salt from seawater. Interestingly, they began the year as vegetarians, but gradually added seafood, eggs, and then meat to their diet as they were able to see the farms where the animals lived and feel okay about purchasing meat from those sources.
A quote that moved me:
After discussing the amazing, original bounty that was the Pacific Northwest before white settlers came and the fact that the imminent collapse of our salmon runs has been predicted for 125 years: "'Nothing suggests the size of former salmon runs than the length of time it took them to collapse'" (quoting Joseph E. Taylor III, 144).
The authors started a movement - see more at 100milediet.org.
* For those who are interested in local native foods, I also found this book in the library: Renewing Salmon Nation's Food Traditions. It's a list of native foods with a short description of how they were used and notes on endangered status (biological and cultural), but not really a how-to if you wanted to start eating such foods. A good ethnobotanical resource. (I also really liked the map of other food-based nations of North America. I imagine hearing "Bison Nation" or "Wild Rice Nation" wouldn't surprise you, but did you know there is a "Corn Bread & BBQ Nation"?)
by Alisa Smith and J. B. MacKinnon
Another engaging book that follows a local eating for one year experiment. In this case, it was a Vancouver, BC couple, and they chose to define "local" as food items from within a 100-mile radius of their urban home. The couple takes turns writing the chronological chapters, and really lets the reader into the personal parts of the story. I also liked that Vancouver is close enough to Seattle that their version of local sounds a lot like mine. The couple also explored local native foods to a degree - salmon (of course), high bush cranberries, and kelp, for example.* And found a source for Bigleaf Maple syrup!
While they did have a small in-city garden, they were not able to grow much of their food themselves, unlike Barbara Kingsolver's experiment. They got to know nearby farmers and fishmongers, ate a lot of potatoes and fresh greens, picked a lot of berries, searched and searched for 100-mile wheat, and were very grateful for a number of good local vineyards. They spent a month of the summer in a remote northern BC cabin and foraged quite a bit of their food and they learned to make salt from seawater. Interestingly, they began the year as vegetarians, but gradually added seafood, eggs, and then meat to their diet as they were able to see the farms where the animals lived and feel okay about purchasing meat from those sources.
A quote that moved me:
After discussing the amazing, original bounty that was the Pacific Northwest before white settlers came and the fact that the imminent collapse of our salmon runs has been predicted for 125 years: "'Nothing suggests the size of former salmon runs than the length of time it took them to collapse'" (quoting Joseph E. Taylor III, 144).
The authors started a movement - see more at 100milediet.org.
* For those who are interested in local native foods, I also found this book in the library: Renewing Salmon Nation's Food Traditions. It's a list of native foods with a short description of how they were used and notes on endangered status (biological and cultural), but not really a how-to if you wanted to start eating such foods. A good ethnobotanical resource. (I also really liked the map of other food-based nations of North America. I imagine hearing "Bison Nation" or "Wild Rice Nation" wouldn't surprise you, but did you know there is a "Corn Bread & BBQ Nation"?)