Rating: ★★★★★
Genre: Comics
Synopsis: Yasmina and her father live in a small apartment. Her father works for every euro they make, and Yasmina repays her father’s hard work by creating gourmet meals from ingredients found at community gardens. But when a potato farmer levels the gardens and creates a new breed of potato that nobody can resist, things begin to go awry…
Review: What a fun and beautiful comic! Filled to the brim with beautiful illustrations and text serving only to continue the narrative where the illustrations cannot, Yasmina and the Potato Eaters is an incredible comic about community, surviving in poverty, and critiquing capitalist endeavors.
Yasmina is a fun-loving, food-loving cook who creates incredible gourmet meals, and each character we meet along the way holds various opinions and manners of interacting with food. Is natural best? Do pesticides work? What’s best–community-run or capitalist-run? What can we learn from vegetables? What can we learn from their production?
I would love to introduce this to my professor–there’s so much to think about in terms of environmental criticism and ecofeminism, and a lot can be gleaned from this text. Overall, this is fun, gorgeous, and really educational! I’m excited to see where this tale goes and to see how it expands.
little lady librarian 