UNEARTHED: ON RACE AND ROOTS, AND HOW THE SOIL TAUGHT ME I BELONG
by Claire Ratinon
Chatto & Windus (Vintage), £16.99
ISBN 978-1784744472
A poetic and sometimes unsettling autobiography detailing how growing food helped redefine a personal relationship with the land.
Reviewer Matthew Biggs is a plant expert, writer and broadcaster.
Claire Ratinon is passionate about growing organic vegetables; it's in her soul. She has grown them for the Ottolenghi Restaurant, Rovi, written about them in The New Statesman and lectured at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. But it hasn't always been this way.
This book documents the twists and turns in Claire's often turbulent life that led her to find an identity through gardening, as a Black woman. We are led through her childhood in London, life as a documentary director, a foray into New York City and a rooftop farm, to the first year in her current home in the East Sussex countryside, where she has finally found some solace in the soil.
It is an informative and enlightening read and certainly an emotional roller coaster.
