Skip to main contentAfter spending two weeks engrossed in a pair of food memoirs, I have been seized by a frenzied flurry of culinary inspirations. I want to pull my own fresh mozzarella, pickle my own sauerkraut, and have my kitchen counter overflow with tomatoes and squash. Not only that, but I want to do it all with ingredients originating near where I lay my head, as do these local-eating champions.
The books that have bombarded me of late are novelist Barbara Kingsolver's new memoir Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (HarperCollins, 384 pages, $26.95) and Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally (Harmony, 272 pages, $24) by Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon. Both are centered on the challenge of spending an entire year eating locally. Both slide all the way through the calendar month-by-month and bounce between several voices to varied effect. And both books are not only entertaining, but may have the power to enlist ordinary people in the local eating crusade.
In Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Kingsolver's 19-year-old daughter Camille provides bright little essays surrounding the recipes that accompany most chapters, and husband Steven provides occasional sidebars of factual info. In Plenty, each month alternates between Alisa and J.B., a funny couple on the brink of marriage or breakup in Vancouver, B.C. Both books are plied with tasty-sounding recipes, some tasteful sentimentality, and hoards and hoards of info about the nasty effects of our packaged, processed, perfumed and non-local-eating pageantry.
Early on Kingsolver proclaims her propensity for asparagus. That veggie apparently takes at least three years after it is initially planted before the green shoots are ready to harvest. The author apparently peppers with asparagus seeds a plot of ground near each and every domicile she's inhabited. (Thus providing at least one serving of vegetables per spring season for anyone who lives nearby.) Other tidbits of personal history are strewn about Animal, Vegetable, which are then echoed in a sweet, sometimes too-much-sugar-in-your-strawberry-lemonade way by Camille. The tale opens with the family's uprooting from sun-slicked Tucson and subsequent transplant to a year-round farm in Appalachian Virginia. Their vow to go local begins in March and comes with tales of turkey sex and younger daughter Lily's garage egg-entrepreneurship. The ubiquitous squash that never runs out makes an appearance, as does zucchini that Camille cleverly hides and serves to her sister as "chocolate-chip zucchini cookies." Husband Steven, meanwhile, feeds the family with his daily bread-making and fires readers up with his tidy write-ups on America's disparaging eating habits—such as the amount of oil put into processing Cracker Jack and the mutation of bugs to combat pesticides.
In Plenty, a pair of former vegetarians in British Columbia are progressively turned to omnivores over the course of 365 days. Fourteen years into their relationship, freelance journalists Alisa Smith and A.J. MacKinnon embark on the experiment of eating locally. Spoiler alert: They don't make it. The imaginary 100-mile circle around Vancouver, B.C., proves too difficult. They make allowances to eat on foreign business trips. They smuggle cheese from across the Washington border and use sea salt from Oregon. But don't judge the cheaters too severely before you try it yourself. In one hilarious anecdote they recount the making their "Death's Head" cheese (stamped with a skull-and-crossbones), bread and pasta, all from mostly local ingredients. They become very friendly with and fond of potatoes. Atkins diet, smatkins diet! These two eat local potatoes for breakfast, lunch and dinner and still manage to lose weight. Sometime during April, J.B. remarks to Alisa, "I think your butt fell off." To which she retorts, "Yours too." Marital distress comes with the sour-smelling fermentation of sauerkraut, but redemption is ultimately found over a bowl of chum (fish tail) soup. The pair is inventive, too: They attempt to make radishes into sandwich bread, and separate the weevils (tiny black creepy-crawlers) from local wheat using the edge of a debit card.
In the end, though, J.B. and Alisa adjust to the lack of out-of-season and out-of-region bananas and avocados and eventually proclaim that this "new" way of eating becomes the preferred norm. They don't want to go back to their old food-wrapper-clogged lives. The cupboard at the Vancouver couple's apartment was once filled with overflow socks and underwear. Now it's filled with five different kinds of local potatoes sprouting eerie eyes, and will probably stay that way. To the east in Virginia, Barbara Kingsolver's daughter Lily probably won't ever start eating Twinkies or Ding Dongs. All of these people have enough stores of canned, shelved, frozen, pickled and preserved booty to take on the next winter. They may have been converted to this mentality forever.
In the reading of these stories you may feel stricken with ineptitude at your own eating habits. It's hard to know how to begin to attempt such a massive change of lifestyle, and really, where would you get enough jars for all those pickled plums, anyway? Clearly, livin' la vida local has far-reaching benefits on your poochie belly and pocketbook alike—Kingsolver estimates she spent 50 cents per family member per meal—not to mention the energy-reducing impact it has on the world at large. Now if only you can solve that stupid jar problem and give up your canned-corn fetish, we'll all be set.
Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon read from Plenty at Powell's Books at Cedar Hills Crossing, 3415 SW Cedar Hills Blvd., 228-4651. 7 pm Wednesday, May 9. Free.
WWeek 2015