Product Description
Like many great adventures, the 100-mile diet began with a memorable feast. Stranded in their off-the-grid summer cottage in the Canadian wilderness with unexpected guests, Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon turned to the land around them. They caught a trout, picked mushrooms, and mulled apples from an abandoned orchard with rose hips in wine. The meal was truly satisfying; every ingredient had a story, a direct line they could trace from the soil to their forks. The e… More >>
Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally
I liked this book a lot until I got to the final chapters. They were reaching the dead of winter in Vancouver and I was interested to see how it went. But then the two of them started traveling to different places and experiencing the local food there. Yes, we could all eat locally if we can afford to travel around when the weather gets bad.
Rating: 1 / 5
This book was easy to read and pretty informative. I don’t think I’ll view my famrer’s market the same way after reading this book about individials who eat only local foods. Funny and easy to follow, it is a light read fro the summer.
Rating: 4 / 5
In Plenty, authors Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon tell their story of living for a year eating only foods produced within 100 miles of their home in Vancouver. This book is also published as Plenty: Eating Locally On The 100 Mile Diet; and The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating.
I think they are all the same. Regardless, I read the “Plenty: Eating Locally On The 100 Mile Diet” version.
So two vegetarian writer/journalists get the bug to eat locally. Gone is olive oil from Italy, sea salt from Hawaii, wine from Australia, or grapes from Chile. Unfortunately, living in the Vancouver, British Columbia area, this also means that wheat is in short supply, salmon is abundant, and most fruits and vegetables are very seasonal.
Here are some tidbits, and comments:
- “We were living on a SUV diet” (p. 5 in Plenty). The 100 mile diet was born.
- “We had a single ironclad rule: that every ingredient in every product we bought had to come from within 100 miles” (p. 10). They did have a “social life amendment” which allowed them to break these rules in social situations.
- As they looked in the grocery stores, they noted “Yet here we were in the modern horn of plenty, and almost nothing came from the people or the landscape that surrounded us. How had our food system come to this” (p. 13).
- “There is a term for the experience of tugging your little red wagon through a strawberry field, and that term is ‘traceability’. It’s a measure of how close or distant one is from one’s food” (p. 54).
- “We never will accept the idea that animals can be treated like machines that produce meat, milk, and eggs” (p. 70). Unfortunately, there are both well cared for machines, and poorly cared for machines. Smith and MacKinnon consume plenty of eggs and dairy products, shellfish, fish, birds, and, eventually, small quantities of beef.
- “If you wish to make an apple pie truly from scratch, you must first invent the universe” (p. 107). I just liked this quote from Carl Sagan!
- “That even Hebda was unaware that [California] condors were reported in the Fraser Valley into the twentieth century illustrates a ket fact about our past. We forget. The effect has been described as a double disappearance. We lose a species, or the abundance of a species, and then forget what it is we have lost” (p. 143). This is also called the “shifting baseline syndrome.”
- When they learned they had to freeze their corn immediately, Smith wrote “It sounded, at best, like a Mormon’s idea of a good-time Saturday night…” (p. 151). I thought this was a bit rude.
- Smith wrote, “I’m thirty-three years old, always broke, and merely ‘existing’ in what, without having been sealed by formal wedding vows, had become a traditional marriage. …My only drama was in my daydreams” (p. 164). Throughout this book, I was continuously reminded that Smith and MacKinnon seemed to have no other life than to look for, prepare, store, and eat food. Their drama seemed to revolve around food, with a few references to being challenged by a bear and some family-related adventures. Few people can devote the time necessary for this type of experiment.
- “The mark of an empire, it seems, is to eat its length and breadth” (p. 198). Interesting idea.
- The differences between locally grown and imported (less fresh) foods? “‘There will be nutritional differences, but they’ll be marginal,’ said [New York University professor Marion] Nestle. ‘I mean, that’s not really the issue. It feels like it’s the issue – obviously fresher foods that are grown on better soils are going to have more nutrients. But people are not nutrient-deprived. We’re just not nutrient-deprived’” (p. 229). This is a key point of the book. If it is not nutrients or food quality we are after, then the theme is that a local diet affects… what? Carbon in the atmosphere and its impact on global and local climate change? Self-sufficiency in case of disaster? Open space? Variety? One-upmanship? Supporting local businesses? Bragging rights? What? For example, the authors write “When at last we were together again, it was in Merida, the cultural capitol of the Yucatan Peninsula, in Mexico. Minnesota, Malawi, Mexico” (p. 244). The energy consumed and CO2 released from this travel… how can you say no to winter grapes from Chile?
Remember “We’re just not nutrient-deprived”? We are deprived of knowledge of where food comes from. We are deprived of the color of local farmers’ markets. Many, many people are deprived of their health from ill-advised food choices (locally produced foods can also be part of a poor diet plan).
So… interesting book. Not THE book. Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants”) will probably give you a better idea of your position in the global and local food chain.
Rating: 4 / 5
I thought “Plenty” was a fantastic book. I had downloaded and read their journal from online before the book came out and loved it. The book was frosting on the cake with its primary data and documentation which support their (and our) efforts to relocalize our eating. Alisa and James’ search for local food echos our own in an efforts to personally relocalize in a town that doesn’t have much insight into what’s happening in the world. Ya done good, kids! You go!
Rating: 5 / 5
Makes you hungry for REAL food
Opens a new world, hidden away for too long
Beautiful and truthful
Essential for here and now and the future of our food supply
Tasty & worth reading!!
Rating: 5 / 5