Book Review

Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally
by Alisa Smith & J. B. MacKinnon
Review by Tammie Ortlieb

Aside from being a fetchingly good read, Plenty dishes up loads of starter seed for the wannabe locavore. A locavore, a relatively new term in the natural foods language, is one who eats only locally produced goods. This is exactly what the authors, both professional writers, set out to do. What begins as a meal of necessity—stuck in a remote cabin with guests to feed and nothing more to serve than a sad-looking head of cabbage—ends in a year long adventure in community, connectedness, and camaraderie.

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The challenge begins with a thrown together meal of foraged goods—potatoes and garlic from a forgotten garden, apples and cherries from a deserted orchard, freshly caught fish, salad greens picked from near the cottage. Would it be possible, Smith and MacKinnon wonder, to eat this way every day? For one year they frequent farm stands, search out wheat sources, fret over canning lids, learn to freeze corn, and eat way more than their fair share of potatoes. And they gather all their goodies from within 100 miles of their tiny one bedroom Vancouver apartment.

Bucking what the authors dub the SUV diet trend, a gas guzzling, overly packaged diet of excess, the two lose weight, test the boundaries of their relationship, and stumble across more than a few quirky, good-hearted local characters. Most foods, they discover, travel the average distance between Denver and New York City before they land on our plates. What's more, they learn, in the time that most Americans spend grocery shopping, driving to and from the store, and unloading their goods, they have killed time nearly equal to that spent preparing foods from scratch twenty years ago.

If Smith and MacKinnon can manage to feed themselves for a year by storing potatoes in an underwear cupboard, I am challenged to provide for my family from the confines of my cozy suburban colonial. With a backyard garden plot and rich southwest Michigan u-picks, I need only wipe down the old chest freezer and steer clear of that mecca of marketing that has become my quick fix for last minute dinners, the mall and its strip. In the words of that famous little blue engine, I think I can, I think I can.

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Tammie Ortlieb is a freelance writer with a Masters Degree in Developmental Psychology. Her work has appeared in VegNews, Veggie Life, Vegetarian Baby and Child Online Magazine, and Mothering.com. She resides in southwest Michigan with her omnivorous husband, three terrific teenagers- two veg, one wannabe-, and a you-tell-em-like-it-is-sister future green revolutionist fabulous fourth grader.

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