One of the sweetest memories I have from my childhood is my mom making preserves and canning or freezing fruit. My favourite was her strawberry jam. One June day my dad would take us all out to a pick-your-own place. Our parents paid us by the basket we picked. We always ended up eating almost as much as we put in the basket. 

Then we’d go home and help my mom sort through the berries: the firmest went into the freezer and the mushy ones into the jam pot, often with rhubarb picked fresh from our garden. She’d always make bread the same day so we could feast on warm strawberry jam on oven-fresh bread. 

I remembered those days fondly while reading Helena Moncrieff’s The Fruitful City: The Enduring Power of the Urban Food Forest (ECW Press, 2018). At its heart, it’s a book about making good use of the thousands of fruit trees in any city that bear fruit, only to rot on the ground while people are going hungry. It’s about connecting property owners willing to share the fruit, volunteers willing to pick it, and neighbours in need. It’s about reducing food waste, connecting people to their environment, and rebuilding the food literacy we’ve lost over the last few generations.

The Fruitful City explores the concept of fruit gathering and sharing in many more dimensions than I imagined were connected, in the process sharing a wide range of fascinating facts. Here are some of the interesting things I learned from this book:

• “Tree Climbers International [who knew?] touts the benefits of being up a tree, including exercise, accessibility and a full sensory experience with hands on bark and the sound of the wind whistling through leaves. Japan is home to a tree-climbing school and has led the way in using trees for therapy.”
• Neuroscientists have used functional MRI to show how acts of giving, such as volunteering for an organization that picks fruit and donates it to those in need, activate the brain’s mesolimbic reward system—the same system engaged in feeling good from monetary gain.
• The Canada Food Guide was developed during WWII to combat nutritional deficiency during rationing. But since that war ended, food illiteracy has grown steadily with the advent of convenience foods that mean we no longer need to know how to grow anything, or how to tell what’s poisonous from what’s safe. 

Like Andrew Reeves’ Overrun, Laura Pratt’s Heartbroken, Lezlie Lowe’s No Place to Go, and Sue Harper’s Winter in the City of Light, among many others, The Fruitful City is thoroughly researched; I learned a lot and for me that’s one of the biggest pleasures of reading. And Moncrieff’s writing is always high quality and, well, clever. Consider this:

Bohemian waxwings are said to get drunk on winter berries. Whitehorse residents have rescued the wobbly birds from wonky flight paths and window crashes, incarcerating them in hamster-cage drunk tanks until they sober up. … In a freeze-and-thaw cycle through the fall, the fruit ferments. The little creatures either can’t tell the difference or they like the experience.

Who wouldn’t love that image? Not to mention the recipes at the end of every chapter.

Full disclosure: Helena Moncrieff is the partner of one of my dearest friends from the class of 2015, Havard Gould. But that in no way influenced how much I enjoyed this book, not least because of the memories it evoked of my mother’s many varieties of jam or the canned peaches that came from the tree in our backyard or the strawberry-rhubarb crisp that she served up warm with ice cream after a summertime dinner.  

My mouth is watering with the memories. 

Read my reviews of other books from the prolific class of 2016:

One Strong Girl: Surviving the Unimaginable—a Mother’s Memoir, by S. Lesley Buxton.

Craigdarroch Castle in 21 Treasures, by Moira Dann.

Press Enter to Continue: Scribes from Babylon to Silicon, by Joan Francuz.

A Cure for Heartache: Life’s Simple Pleasures, One Moment at a Time, by Mary Jane Grant. Review coming soon. 

Sit Still and Prosper: How a Former Money Manager Discovered the Path to Investing with Greater Clarity, Calmness, and Confidence by Stephanie Griffiths. Review coming soon. 

Winter in the City of Light: A Search for Self in Retirement, by Sue Harper.

Nowhere to Go: How Public Toilets Fail Our Private Needs, by Lezlie Lowe.

Highway of Tears: A True Story of Racism, Indifference and the Pursuit of Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, by Jessica McDiarmid.

F-Bomb: Dispatches from the War on Feminism, by Lauren McKeon.

A Distorted Revolution: How Eric’s Trip Changed Music, Moncton and Me, by Jason Murray. Review coming soon. 

Conspiracy of Hope: The Truth about Breast Cancer Screening, by Renee Pellerin. 

Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis, by Andrew Reeves.

The Tides of Time: A Nova Scotia Book of Seasons, by Suzanne Stewart.