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Bottom of the pile
21
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
25/100Critics
17/100Scholars
Author:
Deborah Madison
Publisher:
Knopf Publishing Group
Date:
November 10, 2020
Before she became a household name, Deborah Madison spent almost twenty years as an ordained Buddhist priest, and has long been revered as this country's leading authority on vegetables. This is her story.
What The Reviewers Say
The splendidly meandering narrative reads like a long dinner party with plenty of wine as Madison tells of cooking for M.F.K. Fisher’s birthday and working with Mark Miller, Richard Olney, David Tanis, Judy Rodgers and Waters, with whom she remains great friends.
... thoughtful and thought-provoking.
This disarming memoir, An Onion in My Pocket, is full of surprises. For a start, it’s not generally known that for almost 20 years [the author] was an ordained Buddhist in a monastic community. Or, that when she was a child, her parents refused to buy her Twinkies, so she stole them. She never had a TV dinner. She never had a TV.
While Madison could not have known that her book would be published into a world changed by a pandemic, reading it in this context makes the frustration ever more urgent: If the person who has most famously advocated for a vegetarian diet can’t wholeheartedly endorse it, then what hope is there for significant change to the American obsession with meat?.
