WESTERN BOOK ROUNDUP

Eating - and Reading - Locally

By David Frey, 11-26-08

Thanksgiving is a good time to eat, and it’s a good time to think about what and how we eat. Books on our food culture have almost become a genre in and of itself in recent years. Several excellent books have peeked into the back of the cupboard to see some of the dark corners we’d rather not see. Others have looked for another approach to food.

Here are a few, by Western authors, that are worth a Thanksgiving Day read by the woodstove before you drift off on a tryptophan cloud.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. One-time Arizona author Barbara Kingsolver, best known for a stack of beloved novels, joins her family in a yearlong effort to eat local, and to write about it. They left behind the desert for rural Appalachia, for a deeper connection with their roots, and with the roots that grow their food.

We wanted to live in a place that could feed us: where rain falls, crops grow, and drinking water bubbles right up out of the ground. This might seem like an abstract reason for leaving beloved friends and one of the most idyllic destination cities in the United States. But it was real to us.

Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally.” OK, so these Western authors are from Western Canada. Authors Alisa Smith and J.B. Mackinnon set out on a similar quest in a very different part of the world. Their goal: eat food for a year grown within 100 miles of their Vancouver apartment.

It isn’t only that our food is traveling great distances to reach us; we, too, have moved a great distance from our food. This most intimate nourishment, this stuff of life—where does it come from? Who produces it? How do they treat their soil, crops, animals? How do their choices—my choices—affect my neighbors and the air, land, and water that surround us? If I knew where my food and drink came from, would I still want to eat it? If even my daily bread has become a mystery, might that total disconnection be somehow linked to the niggling sense that at any moment the apocalyptic frogs might start falling from the sky?

At Mesa’s Edge: Cooking and Ranching in Colorado’s North Fork Valley. Eugenia Bone, an accomplished food writer from a foodie family, left behind New York for rural Colorado. She writes about the flavor of her newfound home – the people and the foods –in a delectable book that’s part memoir, part cook book. It is the most Western of them all, and it captures the delights of eating locally, without dwelling on the politics.

I am slowly becoming inspired. It is a strange sneaking-up-on-you kind of inspiration. Not a hit, punch, or blow, but a kind of awakening. I find myself grateful that I have the time, without rushing to feed guests, to sip morning coffee on the porch and note how cool it is. It’s not like the fall or spring coolness that we encounter back East. There’s no anticipation of new bulbs or dead leaves. The cool is huge and empty, as on an ocean, beyond seasons. The cool passes over the ranch like a ghost chasing the night. It heads west along the Smith Fork River and continues, running from the morning. The cool is bold and careless and in a hurry. And there is always the sound of the wind, endless, like waves that never crash.

My appreciation for the rural aesthetic grows steadily. I am in awe of the huge, round bales that dot the surrounding landscape. They give me the same feeling as the Neolithic rocks and circles in northern Europe. There is almost a logic to their randomness that’s just beyond reckoning, and the sight holds me in breathless suspension. I buy eggs from a local rancher and feel as though I’m opening a present every time I lift the top off the carton.

These are books that not only make us think twice about the food we eat, but about the places we live and the flavors that surround us. Bon appétit.

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