Book review: “Our Food Grows,” written by Sarah M. White, illustrated by Tessa Gibbs

Throughout most of human history, children grew up watching plants grow and become food. They helped plant seeds. They helped tend the field or orchard. They helped harvest the rice or the apples or the potatoes.

It’s not the same for most modern American kids.  In the cities and suburbs where they are likely to live, it would be easy for a three-year-old or his five-year-old sister to think that food comes from a potato chips package or a delivery driver or a waiter.

How much does a child wonder where McDonald’s food comes from?  Odds are, not a lot. You get your Happy Meal and your toy, and what more do you need to think about?

Fresh vegetables are selected by a parent from displays in grocery stores. Fruit, too.  It’s put into bags to be taken home and stored in the refrigerator.

It’s as if there’s a wall between the child and the sources of such food. Even if the family is driving somewhere, Dad may say, “Look over to the right at all those fields of corn,” but will a child make the connection between those fields and the corn later on his plate or the popcorn she gets as a treat?

Of course, this isn’t just about food. It’s also about climate and stewardship of the planet, not that kids are likely to do much thinking along those lines in their nursery school years.

But the sooner children understand how interconnected human life and nature are, the sooner they can recognize their responsibility for doing right by the Earth, now and later as an adult.

 

A sweet and wonder-filled book

That’s the context in which Our Food Grows, a sweet and wonder-filled book for children 3 to 5, has been published by the Oakland-based Collective Book Studio and distributed by Simon & Schuster. It is written with simple directness by Sarah M. White and illustrated with bold and vibrant primary colors by Tessa Gibbs, both of whom live in Madison, Wisconsin, with their families.

The opening page asks the question:

“Did you know our food grows?” 

It’s followed by a two-page spread of the sort of packaged food you get at a grocery—a can of tomato sauce, for instance, a bag of popcorn, a frozen box of asparagus spears. The next two-page spread provides a sharp contrast—tomatoes on a climbing vine, strawberries amid flowers, a pod of peas, a corn stalk.

From there White and Gibbs offer four-page sections on a variety of food: strawberries (“Strawberries grow close to the ground”), tomatoes (“They can be BIG, small, or in-between”), asparagus (“Unpicked asparagus grow into ferns”), peas (“Each pea is a seed for a new plant”), and corn (“One piece is called a kernel”).

Our Food Grows is an appealing book.

For a child, it offers bright, intelligible images and perhaps can spark curiosity about the stuff called “food.”  For a parent, it’s a way to start or continue early discussions about how life and the world and all of us and everything are so intricately interconnected.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

5.21.25

 

This review originally appeared at Third Coast Review on 5.27.25.