Michele Darmody’s Seed to Supper.
Michele Darmody’s Seed to Supper.
Darwin amongst the Musks
We will look back in times to come and shake our heads when we reflect on the fact that in our era we have thought it important to teach children how to code a computer, but we did not think it important to tell them how to make a loaf of bread, or how to plant a seed.
Into this age of ignorance comes Michelle Darmody’s book, Seed to Supper, and the book makes Ms Darmody seem like Darwin amongst the Musks, a clear and profound thinker amongst the hype merchants and the bullshitters.
Seed to Supper is not just an amazing book – a future classic, maybe an instant classic, we’d wager – it is also a corrective to the collective madness of our age. Seed to Supper knows who it is, and where it is, a report and a retort from the real world, full of things we should know, but don’t know.
Seed to Supper is a book written for children, but it is a very grown up production. It is filled with beautiful aphorisms that children will read and remember for the rest of their lives: “A bee’s waggle and a worm’s wiggle help to feed the world”; “Soil makes you smile”; “Say hello to a ladybird”. What Darmody brilliantly achieves in her book is a framing of nature, both literally and figuratively. She borrows from the naturalist David George Haskell in suggesting that children improvise a frame and set it down in their garden or a park, then draw whatever is inside the frame.
The book as a whole then frames food and its production and consumption within the bigger picture of nature, history and the environment. She subtly disarms the bad guys – food miles; UPFs; chemicalised agriculture – whilst distilling a lifetime of living and learning into a mere 128 pages.
The concision of the book, its pitch-perfect tone, and the adorable illustrations by Ruth Graham combine to create something truly special, a book that makes learning – and growing and cooking – a whole bunch of fun. A copy of Seed to Supper should be purchased by the Department of Education and gifted to every child entering national school, and it should form a compulsory part of the school curriculum.
That won’t happen, of course, but you can always play the Minister for Education in your own home, with your own kids.
Seed to Supper is published by Nine Bean Row Books. Purchase here.
A copy in every classroom is the dream!
Sounds like my kind of book, thank you for putting me on to it