I talk about this book in this video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdZqo25crJU c:

This book is a memoir about Landrigan’s activism, her vegetarianism and her eventual realisation that even meat-free food is not always ethical. She discusses the impacts corporations have on vegetarian processed or packaged food, the huge migrant population who pick fruits and vegetables under terrible conditions and how, for some people, abstaining from meat is not an option at all.

Okay. I feel like I would’ve enjoyed this book a lot more if my expectations had been different going into it, so I’m going to adjust those expectations for you right now so you might enjoy it more. I went into this memoir thinking it would be a little like Jonathan Safran Foer’s, lots of journalism with dips into personal narratives.

But it really is a memoir. I got to read all about her boyfriends, her struggles with her family, everything. It … almost felt like a performance. It felt so edited, like when you look back on old facebook statuses and they’re not embarrassing per se, but you know you were trying to be something you weren’t and so now it’s hard to connect to that person again.

Landrigan starts out this book as a militant vegetarian — a label and set of values she gradually divests herself from, once she realises that the problems that exist in the meat-eating industry are not dissimilar from the vegetarian and even organic food industry.

I just...didn’t understand her constant mild isolation. It was like a miasma that infected all of her work and any time she talked about her family she just went on and on about how different she was from them, and I was like … bruh. This is weird.

She regularly acknowledges her privilege and yet, in one chapter, Corn Fed, discusses romantically wandering into someone’s corn field to look around as if it was no big deal. As if anyone, regardless of the colour of their skin, could also hop into a stranger’s corn field to look around. I’m not sure if this is what actually happened — in reality, she probably asked to see someone’s cornfield and didn’t want to include that information in the text because of its loss of rhythm but … I don’t know, it just made me feel weird.

All that aside, Strawberry Fields was an excellent chapter and totally what I was looking for in this book. I feel like a lot of her chapters would work better as articles in a newspaper than in a book. I found it readable until I came upon lines like “I was the problem” which reminded me that she had this obsession with loneliness and isolation.

The sources she used tended to be more interesting than her writing, and when she’d quickly refer to something, I’d want her to go back and elaborate on that story rather than her own.

At times, this didn’t feel like a memoir, but a diary. And diaries have their time and their place, I’ve used them before and loved using them but there’s a difference between a memoir and a diary.

I loved the chapter Elk Country where Marissa moves to Montana and meets a First Nations co-worker named Maggie, who says she’s unsure she can be friends with a vegetarian because she first learnt to skin an elk at 13. Marissa often referred back to this colleague and herself, how close-minded she herself had been. So I looking forward to Elk Country Part II, where Marissa goes back to Montana to hunt an elk with an ethical hunter.

And then Marissa says: “I felt myself edging closer to understand what hunting meant to Maggie.” Excuse me? I… there are so many things wrong with this statement. Firstly, Maggie’s family has been doing this for tens of thousands of years. Secondly, the author already knew this because she then goes on to explain that many Native American tribes are called buffalo tribes because of their close connection to the animal and the land.

But hunting an elk once with an ethical hunter does not mean you come closer to understanding tens of thousands of years of cultural history and practice. I understand this probably wasn’t what Landrigan meant at all but there was just something off about it that I couldn’t place — this white-centering, where Marissa got to live a part of Maggie’s experience while not actually being First Nations.

ANYWAY. I feel like I’ve dragged this book long enough so I want to say that it was readable, but I did struggle with so many aspects of it. I enjoyed the chapters Elk Country, Strawberry Fields, Chickpeas for Breakfast, Precocious Squash and From Scratch.

I wanted to like this so much more than I did and I’m so disappointed I didn’t, but I hope now that I’ve given you a better idea of what the book is about, you’ll enjoy it more than I did.
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