Food isn't always cool, at least not in North America. Thankfully, some of the time it is cool, and Tuesday 27 May is one of those times.
Pages, an excellent independent Toronto bookstore that has somehow stayed classy and cool on the way to becoming iconic, is featuring an event with Barbara Kingsolver as part of their This is Not A Reading Series, um, series. Kingsolver will be discussing her book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. It's about the year she and her family spent living on food that was either locally produced or grown by themselves. Note that tickets are being sold in advance, and when I got mine along with the ever-cool Jean-Anne, the staff person at Pages mentioned they were selling out quickly.
I'm looking forward to this on a few different levels. For one thing, I continue to flip between fiction and non-fiction in my reading, so a non-fiction book by someone who usually writes fiction sounds like a good bet. For another, I grew up with a large percentage of my diet being grown by my parents (helped by me when I got a bit older) — we had two large vegetable patches and 10-12 assorted fruit trees on our lot when I was a kid. My parents did a lot of pick-your-own to supplement the home-grown food, and we did a lot of preserves and jams too.
I'm hoping there will be some leads on pick-your-owns around Toronto. It's hard to do when you're a singleton apartment dweller, but I'd love to at least pick some local strawberries, since
they're impossible to get at the supermarket even when they are in season.
Not to mention it will just be nice to listen, talk, think, breathe books.
Pages, an excellent independent Toronto bookstore that has somehow stayed classy and cool on the way to becoming iconic, is featuring an event with Barbara Kingsolver as part of their This is Not A Reading Series, um, series. Kingsolver will be discussing her book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. It's about the year she and her family spent living on food that was either locally produced or grown by themselves. Note that tickets are being sold in advance, and when I got mine along with the ever-cool Jean-Anne, the staff person at Pages mentioned they were selling out quickly.
I'm looking forward to this on a few different levels. For one thing, I continue to flip between fiction and non-fiction in my reading, so a non-fiction book by someone who usually writes fiction sounds like a good bet. For another, I grew up with a large percentage of my diet being grown by my parents (helped by me when I got a bit older) — we had two large vegetable patches and 10-12 assorted fruit trees on our lot when I was a kid. My parents did a lot of pick-your-own to supplement the home-grown food, and we did a lot of preserves and jams too.
I'm hoping there will be some leads on pick-your-owns around Toronto. It's hard to do when you're a singleton apartment dweller, but I'd love to at least pick some local strawberries, since
they're impossible to get at the supermarket even when they are in season.
Not to mention it will just be nice to listen, talk, think, breathe books.