A Slice of Organic Life
Editor-in-chief Sheherazade Goldsmith, Foreword by Alice Waters
(Dorling Kindersley 2007, ISBN 978-0-7566-2873-4)
review by Ysanne Spevack
This book is a wide-ranging compendium of everyday ideas for a greener lifestyle. Edited by the wife of the founder of the UK’s Ecologist magazine, A Slice of Organic Life is a rough beginner’s guide to organic lifestyle.
The focus is firmly on the home and home garden, with some great ideas for window boxes, homemade cleaning products, eco-gifts and composting. Find out how to make your own wood floor polish out of beeswax. Learn how to distinguish edible wild mushrooms from poisonous fungi.
Get inspired to create a wildlife pond in your backyard, and while you’re outside, there are beginner’s tips for raising pigs, keeping a milking cow, tending a flock of ducks and even choosing a hive to keep a colony of honey bees.
The organic culinary ideas are simply written and very practical. The recipes are scattered throughout the book, and are all very basic and user-friendly. My favorites are the simple recipes for sauerkraut, strawberry jam, flavored oils, and goat’s cheese from scratch.
This is a fantastic book for sparking ideas, although it’s very much in a magazine style. By this, I mean that the ideas are generally first thoughts on a subject. For example, the section on bee keeping is a beginner’s guide in six pages. If you truly want to keep bees, you’ll need a whole book dedicated to the subject before you’re ready to get started.
Overall, this is a great gift book for someone who loves all things organic. Good clean design coupled with nice modern photos, it’s a good book from a good publisher.
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