Plenty is Engaging, Enlightening
Book Explores Local Eating, Modern Food
A review of Alisa Smith's and J.B. MacKinnon's book about their year-long experiment with a 100-mile diet.
Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally (2007, Harmony Books) is a rare and wonderful piece of work: a book of non-fiction whose authors are so engaging that it reads as quickly and easily as an entertaining novel. At Plenty's end, just as you might upon finishing a fictional page-turner, you find yourself heart-warmed, enlightened, yet a bit sad to let these endearing characters -- the book's two authors -- go.
Alisa Smith's and J.B. MacKinnon's experiment in "Plenty" (titled more obviously "The 100-Mile Diet" in the Canadian version) sounds simple but turns out to be fraught with challenges and frustrations: spend a year eating nothing but food grown or produced within 100 miles of their one-bedroom apartment in Vancouver, British Columbia. The idea might strike readers unfamiliar with life on Canada's Pacific coast as impossible, but the region is actually rich with farms, dairies, apiaries and fisheries close enough to keep its residents well fed and satisfied for much of the year.
Unfortunately for Smith and MacKinnon, that part of the year doesn't include March, the start of spring on the calendar but still a time of wintry weather and barren fields in reality ... and the month they decide to embark on their local eating challenge. So the diet starts mostly with locally grown root vegetables. Lots and lots of root vegetables.
"James and I were eating the foods of austerity," Smith writes in describing endless bowls of borscht. "Borscht belonged to the long winters of the nineteenth-century Russian steppes, flavored by bone-chilling wind, a steel sky, and oppression. Beets, cabbage, potatoes ... 'War vegetables,' James called them."
As the seasons progress and the region's agricultural lands bring forth their harvests, Smith's and MacKinnon's experiment grows a little easier, with one notable exception: bread. The couple don't find a local wheat farmer until nine months into their challenge, but when they finally do, the discovery is like manna from heaven:
"There was more that needed to be done, I suppose," MacKinnon writes after acquiring 75 pounds of local flour. "Winter was suddenly here, and we should have canned some sauerkraut or, I don't know, smoked some salmon or started making yogurt. Instead, we heated the apartment with baking: bread, biscuits, pies, pizza dough, tortillas, even crackers ... We were back in the familiar world of carbohydrate loading, and yet it was not the same. I had never imagined the difference fresh flour would make. Everything we made we ate simply, letting the flavor of the wheat stand alone. It tasted -- ancient. We would sit together to break the bread. A sacred act."
But "Plenty" is more than one couple's diary about the difficulties of eating the way our great-great-grandparents used to. It's also a well researched and thoughtful meditation on the often unsustainable, tradition-killing nature of modern agriculture, food production and food distribution. Ultimately, that exploration leads to the book's real lesson: that there really is a better way.
"Our 100-mile diet hadn't ended, not really," Smith writes at the book's conclusion. "A few favorites have slowly made their way back into the kitchen -- lemons, and rice, and beer. Many others, like bland bananas and white sugar, haven't yet. For us, the balance of global versus local food has been reversed. It comes down to this: we just like the new way better."
Food, Smith and MacKinnon discovered during their year-long adventure, is about more than just filling stomachs and delivering calories. It's a connection with the community that actually grows and raises real food. It's a connection with the land. And that's a connection many of us would do better to try to make again.
