Into the Vegetable Garden

Bloch-Dano’s collection of lectures can be like a first stroll in a garden, lingering briefly by each vegetable.

By Stephanie Tsank

A review of Vegetables: A Biography, by Evelyne Bloch-Dano, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (The University of Chicago Press, 2012)

Excerpt

Bloch-Dano is not simply prodding the private lives and histories of vegetables; she is also prodding our own private lives and histories, and in the process, promoting a very specific lifestyle that is literally rooted in our careful interaction with life around us. Our relationship to vegetables, she contends, is one of pleasure, not simply necessity.