Year of Plenty

Year of Plenty (Sparkhouse Press) $12.95

With poignancy and wit, Craig Goodwin relates his family’s year of living locally in the new book, Year of Plenty: One Suburban Family, Four Rules, and 365 Days of Homegrown Adventure in Pursuit of Christian Living. Frustrated after one more Christmas of buying gifts that they didn’t like and didn’t need, Craig and his wife, Nancy, decide to do what seems so rare these days: they changed their way of life. Five rules, hatched hastily over dinner one night shaped the next year of their family’s consumption: local, used, homegrown, homemade and Thailand (you’ll just have to read the book to understand that last one).

In spite of a growing genre of books about families and individuals spending a year eating locally, this book, and the Goodwin family’s experiment, is not about jumping on a cultural bandwagon. Goodwin’s experience brings a fresh perspective to the growing conversation about environmentalism and sustainable living, which is captured in the subtitle. Theirs is an “adventure in pursuit of Christian living.” Arguing that Christian faith has been largely colonized by the modernist narrative of consumption and unlimited growth, the Goodwin family deliberate steps off the treadmill and dares to ask whether there is something deeply amiss about our “normal” way of life. In a play on Wendell Berry’s well-known phrase, “eating is an agricultural act,” Goodwin declares, “eating is a theological act” (195). He goes on to explain,