Plenty by Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnonHarmony Books, 2007 (originally Random House of Canada, 2007)

I was familiar with the premise of Plenty before I started reading it: after learning that the food we eat generally travels between 1,500 and 3,000 miles before getting to us, two Canadians decided to embark on a year of local eating. For Smith and MacKinnon, “local” meant food that came from within 100 miles of Vancouver: and so, the 100-mile diet was born. I like Smith and MacKinnon’s descriptions of the joys and challenges of eating all-local meals: the delight of farmers markets and farm visits, learning the story behind food, like meeting “a farmer who holds her chickens until their heartbeats slow before swiftly killing them,” or talking to another farmer about bean varietals, or apple varietals (p 225). I like the idea that eating locally, in addition to being better for the planet, can involve re-learning things we’ve historically forgotten, like the names and tastes of different kinds of strawberries. At times, though, I found the breezy journalistic tone of the book off-putting: not that the writing is bad, because it’s not, but that I felt like the mix of the personal and the reportorial wasn’t as satisfying as I wanted it to be. And, minorly: generalizations about urban life and what it’s like annoy me. There aren’t too many in this book, but one stuck out: “By the time we were halfway home,” Alisa writes about a visit to the University of British Columbia Farm, “I realized I was grinning. How often does that happen in modern city life?” (p 75) For me, living in New York? Daily. Yes, part of what makes me grin are things like going to the Saturday farmers market at Grand Army Plaza or coming home on Thursdays to bags of fresh produce from our weekly CSA farmshare, but ultimately: I wouldn’t assume everyone’s experience of city life is the same as mine, and it irks me when other people do so.