by Robyn Metcalfe

Who’d have thought a book all about food logistics would be so boring? OK, shut up.

It just never seemed to go anywhere. It felt like any paragraph could have been interchanged with any other. It all just read to me like a bunch of random sentences about food logistics.

I also have a pet peeve about the phrase “farm to plate”, and phrases about food getting to your “plate”, and some variation of this appeared on nearly every page. People rarely eat off of plates anymore.

Oh, and the subtitle: “Growing Bananas in Iceland and Other Tales from the Logistics of Eating.” I don’t remember a thing about growing bananas in Iceland. If it was mentioned, it was short enough for me to zone out over.

by Helen Joyce

This book should have been shorter and more balanced. That said, it states some things that desperately needed stating. Pediatric transitioning now seems more disturbing to me than ever.

Something that has always bothered me about our current understanding of trans identity, that I don’t think I’ve ever seen explicitly stated elsewhere, is that it seems to think gender is definable by the most culture-specific, superficial things – i.e. liking pink and liking dresses makes you a girl. Joyce discusses how being trans is explained to children: “You nod along to descriptions of restrictive gender norms, hoping for the right conclusion: that nobody need conform if they do not want to, and that there is nothing wrong with boys playing with dolls or girls playing with trucks. You long to hear that girls (or boys) are people with female (or male) bodies who behave however they damn well please; instead you hear that girls (or boys) are people who behave in feminine (or masculine) ways.”