Join us in reading the February Co-op Good Food Book Club Blessing the Hands That Feed Us: What Eating Closer to Home Can Teach Us About Food, Community, and Our Place on Earth by Vicki Robin. The Book Club will meet Sunday, February 23, from6:00-7:30 at a member’s private residence to discuss Blessing. Email bookclub@moscowfood.coop for more information and directions.
One day in 2010, Vicki Robin—the best-selling and beloved author of Your Money or Your Life—became a guinea pig for her local farmer. Her farming friend, “wanted to test whether she could feed another human being for a full month from what she could grow on her half acre.” Robin, a committed test subject, “wanted to test, from a sustainability perspective, if we here on Whidbey Island could survive without to that cornucopia we call the grocery-store. We called the experiment a 10-mile diet.” Robin says that experiment turned out to be “one of the greatest experiences of her life.”
Hyper aware that the grocery stores on Whidbey Island are at the tail end of a long, fossil-fuel-supported supply train…and that if the ferries to the island were to stop running, those same grocery stores would run out of food in three short days, Robin wanted to know if the island itself, could support her, and by extension, others. She laments that so many of us have lost touch “with the hands that feed us, to our detriment, and this story is meant to show you what lies at the other end of the industrial food scale, to help you see that there are reasonable and heartening alternatives.”
Robin says, “The 10-mile diet changed me…Best of all, I finally landed somewhere on earth, in a real place with real soil and forest, a real community where I belong the way my skin belongs to me. I am a part of life; not at a remove in self-sufficiency but connected in reciprocity, mutuality, and care.”
Because in the end, Blessing the Hands That Feed Us is really about this month’s theme: Love. It is a book about loving our farmers, the food they grow, the community they support, the earth which sustains us, and the blessings that come from eating locally grown food. And, through all this, it is about loving ourselves.
Please join us to discuss Blessing the Hands That Feed Us Sunday, February 23 from 6:00-7:30 pm. Remember to emailbookclub@moscowfood.coop for the meeting location and directions and/or to receive email reminders about the Good Food Book Club.Blessing (Viking, 2014) by Vicki Robin is available through your local library. If you are interested in buying the book, check out the area’s local used book stores or visit Book People of Moscow where Book Club members receive a discount. For more information about the Good Food Book Club, check out the Outreach section of the Moscow Food Co-op website at www.moscowfood.coop.
