Land & Table Book Club

Books play a key role in helping us envision and take steps towards positive life change. And it’s a journey - no one ever arrives, but we can encourage each other along the way.

The Land & Table book club is a way to engage with the core ideas and topics that are motivating a new generation to create a more resilient food system and vibrant local community life. We’ll be reading books about: eating local, self-reliant living, agrarian culture, growing food, culinary history, community resilience, going back-to-the-land, and more.

This is not a book club that will be technical in nature. And if you don’t have a green thumb, you’ll still feel at home. You don’t have to grow your own food or be a homesteader or farmer to enjoy these books. But…you do have to be curious about reviving your connection with the land, with other people, and with the food you eat. And the reality is: tending to those connections is important for all of us.

We meet on the first Thursday of each month and welcome anyone to our meetings - even if you have not read the book we will be discussing.

Registration is encouraged, but not required.

For more information about Land & Table, please visit their website: https://landandtable.com/.

This month we will be discussing: In Defense of Food: an Eater's Manifesto by Michael Pollan.

(Click title link above to place a copy on hold. In Defense of Food also available as an ebook and audiobook on HOOPLA, and was made into a documentary available on DVD.)

And if you're up for some supplemental reading--or short on time--try Pollan's follow-up book, Food Rules: an Eater's Manual, an easy-to-use guide laying out a set of straightforward, memorable rules for eating wisely, one per page, accompanied by a concise explanation.

Summary

#1 New York Times Bestseller from the author of How to Change Your Mind, The Omnivore's Dilemma, and Food Rules 

Food. There's plenty of it around, and we all love to eat it. So why should anyone need to defend it?

Because in the so-called Western diet, food has been replaced by nutrients, and common sense by confusion--most of what we're consuming today is longer the product of nature but of food science. The result is what Michael Pollan calls the American Paradox: The more we worry about nutrition, the less healthy we see to become. With In Defense of Food, Pollan proposes a new (and very old) answer to the question of what we should eat that comes down to seven simple but liberating words: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." Pollan's bracing and eloquent manifesto shows us how we can start making thoughtful food choices that will enrich our lives, enlarge our sense of what it means to be healthy, and bring pleasure back to eating.