Food for Thought

For those of us who read and enjoyed The 100-Mile Diet, Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon’s chronicles of a year spent eating close to home, the past couple of weeks have offered up a plethora of opportunities to learn more.

The authors were here the week before last to do several readings in support of the region’s One Book, One Community project. And plenty of others around town who support local and sustainable eating have been offering up workshops on gardening and preserving, screening agriculture-related films, hosting local food nights and facilitating lots of discussion.

As things quiet down, we still find ourselves in the blessed midst of harvest season. But with the threat of the nighttime frost ever-looming and the inevitable stretch of winter ahead, eating close to home isn’t so easy. A little inspiration may be required, so I’ve put together a list of books to hunker down with on the chilly nights to come, ones that might further inform and inspire.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
Barbara Kingsolver with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver
American novelist Kingsolver and her family move from the city to their farm in Appalachia, where they make a concentrated effort to eat only what they or their neighbours grow. I read this book in July and immediately wanted to press it into the hands of anyone and everyone. It’s a perfect balance of politics, investigation and memoir and Kingsolver captures all the joys of local eating like no one else could. You’ll laugh, you’ll be appalled, and, when she finally becomes proud mama to hatching turkey chicks, you might even shed a tear.

Apples to Oysters: A Food Lover’s Tour of Canadian Farms
Margaret Webb
This book takes you along with Webb, a journalist who herself grew up on a farm, as she takes a series of cross-Canada trips over the course of a couple of years in an effort to attach faces and personalities to the growers of the foods we’ve come to think of as especially-Canadian – cod, flax, apples, potatoes, pork and the like. Webb describes the farmers as “chefs of the soil and the sea, tractor-seat philosophers, poet biologists, thingamajig inventors and zealous educators,” and argues that they are “the critical ingredient too often missing from our discussions of food.”

Slow Food Nation: Why Our Food Should Be Good, Clean and Fair and Slow Food Revolution: A New Case for Eating and Living
Carlo Petrini
Petrini, an Italian gourmand, is the Slow Food movement’s founder and guru. He outlines his philosophies in both books – the need for sustainable food production and fair treatment of food producers and the need for food to be both healthful and delicious. He also shows us North Americans how much we can learn from other countries and cultures when it comes to eating well in all senses of the word.

In Defence of Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma
Michael Pollan
“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” So sums up Michael Pollan in his In Defence of Food. The first two words of that statement seem unnecessary at first glance, but Pollan argues that what most of us take in is not food, but rather “edible foodlike substances.” Eek. He also reminds us that it’s not just about what you eat, but how you eat it, encouraging us to get “out of the car and back to the table.” (Eek again. Guilty as charged.) In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan investigates the good, bad and ugly of the journey our food, be it industrial or organic, takes as it makes its way to our plate.
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