Recent reading: Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon, The 100-Mile Diet

Read cover-to-cover last night on the couch between 10pm and 1am, blinds swinging in the breeze, beans' leaves folded in tight against the cold, like chickens tucking their heads beneath a wing, stuffed cats vigilant beside them. A peculiar book, a patchwork of old blog posts, thoughtful historical asides, directions to small Fraser Valley farms, over-ripe Kitsilano rhapsodizing about the rockier portions of the co-authors' long relationship. Everyone on the West Coast wants to talk about their feelings:

"'Tell me about your inner workings.'

'I don't have inner workings.'

'You don't have anything but inner workings!'"

Some readers will find these digressions profound and meaningful. I want to intrude on the narrative, to impose stricter editorial control, to point out that the co-authors' emotional interactions with each other are far better developed through their relationships with local farmers; with friends; with parents, siblings, and the ghosts of dead grandparents; with their Skeena River neighbor Roy, who lives in a tent in the bush on the outskirts of a ghost town and cans his own salmon. When the co-authors' relationship materializes only in passing, as a component of their journalistic investigation of local food production and their relationship to the "natural web" that sustains them, their writing crackles with profound curiosity about the world. When it doesn't, their sentences are curiously flat and ridden with cliches. "Could my restlesslessness be, rather than a desire for greater motion, a longing to understand how truly to take root in one place?" Who fucking cares? The cats and I want to hear more about pumpkin honey; about the improvised soup with the chum salmon tail; want directions to the Fraser Valley hazelnut farm and the Vancouver Island farm that sells 100-mile grain.

One of the better paragraphs, which made a deep impact on me:

"Hebda, when he gives talks to the public, often suggests something he calls the One Bean Revolution. Everyone, he says, should plant at least a single bean in a windowsill pot. He will always recommend a bean over, say, a tree, because a bean reinforces an original truth: that human beings are sustained by the natural world. The thing we call nature is not, as a tree can be, just something to look at on weekends out of the city. It is what keeps us alive. This is so basic a fact that it seems tedious to say it, and yet this understanding is not among the founding principles of civilization as we know it. There was a time, though, where we felt this knowledge every time we ate."
- posted by cjb @ 9:00 AM