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I just finished this book. Well, more accurately, I finished the book, immediately went to the powells books website, ordered a copy for me to have and potentially lend, added two more books to the order to get above the free shipping threshold, and now I’m here.

Going in, there was a lot of reasons this book was likely to find its audience in me. It is about the future of food and cooking, sustainable and regenerative farming, preservation and of restoration the health of the oceans, practical approaches to confronting and adapting to the climate crisis, and ways of looking at all of these that should appeal lots of different minded folks. It intersected with a lot of things I find interesting even if, on its face, the overall thrust of the book could simplistically be stated as, “We should have more small seaweed and shellfish farms.”

The best way I can think of to describe the book as a whole is this. Imagine you are at a party. A party for grown-ups where the wine has been carefully selected and the hors d’oeuvres tastefully displayed. The music is present by understated to the point of being only noticeable with a bit of effort. The generic small talk is universal and you’ve had largely the same conversation several times now. At one point you find yourself separated from the other groups of folks and next to a person that looks not quite comfortable here. Maybe they’re fidgeting with a drink or maybe they are dressed in a way that makes them stand out.

You are a polite person of course and you ask them their name, content to go through the same conversation once more. But after you ask them what they do, something happens. There is a light behind their eyes as they start to answer and you don’t get the one liner from the top of their LInkedIn profile but the maybe a question, or the start of a larger story. In any case in doesn’t stop, there is a momentum to their speech now and despite the fact that this was never how this conversation was planned to go, it is easy to be carried away by the fact that this person, this odd human, is clearly and sincerely passionate about what they are talking about it and they think you should be too. They think it’s important and they’d like to teach you about it. Not in a condescending way, but almost in the way a good friend might try and expose their friends to a new hobby they’ve become enamored with.

Before you know it you’ve been talking about this thing, this thing that you previously had never really considered for more than a few minutes at a time, you’ve been talking about this thing for an hour or two and you feel like you could keep going. That’s how I felt reading this book. I don’t know if others will too, but I loved it and it absolutely had me considering the viability of starting a small seaweed and shellfish farm.