Marielle

Equal parts entertaining and insufferable.

"We're so much in our minds, waiting for something to happen, acting it out, that the body and the outer world might as well not exist, for all it concerns us."

This one goes out to all my depressed girlies

Want to give this a solid 3.5. The overall narrative and themes (authoritarianism, dystopia, 1984 etc etc etc) are well explored territory but this still felt like a fresh take. Something in the English translation felt a little too bluntly styled to me.

Super bingeable. At times cringe inducing in a good way. Other times painfully bad dialogue.

Nice recipes however the author (and publisher) definitely should have done some fact-checking on claims made about the environmental impact of eating ‘local'.

At several points in the book the author seems to posit that eating local and reducing food miles is the best thing we can do to reduce our impact on the climate - even going so far as to claim that eating locally raised grass-fed beef would be better than eating a processed vegan sausage that's been flown into the country.

This is completely false. Beef is by far the most carbon-intensive food we can eat, wherever it's grown, whatever it's fed, not matter no how. The carbon footprint of transporting most foods is fairly insignificant compared to what is required to produce it in the first place. ESPECIALLY BEEF. (See https://www.co2everything.com/co2e-of/beef or https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local or the book ‘How bad are bananas')

Spreading misinformation like this is is both unhelpful and easily avoided in the 21st century. Eating local is great for a variety of other reasons but a very weak argument for climate action - I get the feeling the author is more keen on morally demonising processed foods than coming to terms with this fact. :)