I really enjoyed this book. It’s the story of a couple who took a year to try to eat locally, as in food grown within 100 miles of them. They take turns writing chapters. I enjoyed:
* the quality of the writing
* the fascinating stuff I learned about food and about the culture and cuisine of the far north of Washington State and the far south of Canada
* the inspiration to explore different local farms and other food producers where I live because it involves so much adventure and connection with the earth

My favorite thing I learned:
* Local food is not the same thing as native food! you can grow a lot of stuff practically anywhere and it “counts” as local. I always bought into the ideas (debunked through their experiences) that there is only a limited array of things that we can grow even here and that the best way to get diversity in what we eat is by having supermarkets ship stuff like starfruit and year-round grapes from all over the world. SO not true.

My main problem with it:
* I can put up with a certain amount of people’s crazy without any evidence that they are dealing with it. But there was a growing amount of crazy coming from one of the authors, to the point where it became its own plot arc. It was about depression, maybe even suicidality, intense shame, you know, the usual. While reading it, I wrote, “I don’t totally trust them to resolve it rather than doing the super-common ([unhealed] addict/abuse survivor) thing of ‘And then it just went away and we never talked about it again.’ We’ll see!”

Well, I was right. And it boggles my mind. I’ve heard, recently, that editors at publishing houses are not for copy-editing so much as for checking spelling errors; my fantasy that they go through the text saying “Well, now, this plot line never got wrapped up, and are you sure this is the approach you want to take with this section of the book?” is, in reality, apparently rare to nonexistent, depending on the publisher.

What this book needed was more of a critical eye on the story as a whole. All the food stuff was great, but the personal stuff was extremely wobbly. And, I have to say, it’s difficult on the reader to go through the emotional rollercoasters of a couple struggling with serious mental health issues, without any open acknowledgment that that’s where we are going or any closure. (It also kind of kills me because early in the book, they openly introduce a “protagonist” who then dies, and they talk about why they brought this person into the book even though their time in it would be so short, and I’m like… so you can notice and acknowledge that? Where was that skill later on?! Throw me a bone here!)

Basically, while the rest of their stories boil down to things like “People are great and quirky all over,” or “There is adventure to be had no matter where you are,” or “We can all eat fantastically well and save the environment to boot,” there is just this one that sticks out, throbbing, sore-thumbly: “Sometimes people struggle together because at least one of them is insanely depressed and really obviously drags that internalized shame around at all times, but it doesn’t really matter because… hey look! Spring greens!! LOOK AT THE SPRING GREENS EVERYBODY”

This problem isn’t limited to Plenty: plenty of other food books, I’ve noticed, feature the Real-Life Protagonist Struggling With Unacknowledged Unresolved Heart-Wringing Shame. Julie & Julia, and The Sharper Your Knife, The Less You Cry, really stick out in my mind as belonging to this category. It’s striking because the food parts are always so well-written here, but the emotional landscape remains so unexamined.

I would recommend this book heartily for the insights into local food, local gardening, into exploration and connection with others, into the joy of meeting strangers and bonding over an apple, into the amazing foods I had never heard of and the journey of eating locally for a year all of a sudden, with no preparation. Just be prepared for a few emotional pitfalls along the way.