Review of “From the Farm to Our Table” by Sarah Rowe, Illustrated by Amanda Morrow

Score: 94+/100 (9.4+ out of 10)

Who here loves crispy bacon? What about some ribeye steak?
How many of you drink a glass of milk or eat eggs at the beginning of the day?
Well, do you ever wonder where these things come from and how they're farmed and produced? Do you ever stop to appreciate the animals, farmers, land, and labor that allow these things to reach your plate and dining room table?

From the Farm to Our Table is a heartwarming, adorable, and eye-opening children's book about the topic of sustainable farming as a farm family gathers ingredients to make a shepherd's pie.

Along the way, they encounter, feed, and appreciate a lot of the animals that make their meals possible like the pigs in their pig pen that provide the bacon, the chickens in the hen house that provide the eggs, and the cows in the barn that provide the milk.

Author Sarah Rowe is better known in WWE as Valhalla of the Viking Raiders or Sarah Logan of the Riott Squad. She champions the concept of living off the fruits of your labor: hunting, raising, harvesting, and farming your own food for the sake of sustenance, survival, and sustainability.

This isn't a book about eating food, it's about appreciating where that food comes from and the nutrition that food provides.

It needs to be noted that this book features no scenes or depictions of slaughter or explicit deaths of animals, although that is realistically a part of rural farm life and is lightly and tactfully implied. The presentation of this lifestyle is presented in a bright, positive, and appreciative light.

Appreciative is the key word. This book really focuses on the gratitude, thankfulness, and appreciation that the two children, Leo and Finlay, gain from learning about sustainable farming and everything involved in putting food on their table.

All of us, obviously, eat food. Most of us eat meat and other animal products like eggs and cheese. Very few of us actually stop to think about where those foods come from and what goes into farming/producing them.

Talking to children about farming can seem tough at first, but books like From the Farm to Our Table can help children to better understand the idea that whole, natural foods don't come magically from out of nowhere, and they don't originate at a store. There's a whole intricate and meaningful process behind it, an intricate and meaningful process that results in making things like a shepherd's pie.

One of the best things about this book are the colorful illustrations and the cute, lovable characters. This book is colorfully and beautifully illustrated by the talented Amanda Morrow, someone who deserves a lot of the credit for elevating this book and making it into something that families, children, and classrooms can enjoy.

This is not just a great bedtime book, but it could also make an excellent circle-time book as well. The length, illustrations, and pacing of the story are just about perfect for those purposes. Even if younger kids get lost about the book's message, they can still enjoy looking at the animals and replicating the sounds that they make. An adorable dog also follows the characters just about everywhere they go, giving children something cute and appealing to keep up with at all times.

Mama is presented as both beautiful and capable in this, a normal-sized woman in overalls as opposed to a Barbie doll or supermodel. There's something really relatable and down to earth about that. She looks like a mom, someone familiar and comforting. We did kinda wish we saw more of the handsome, red-bearded hunk of a dad in this book as he's relegated to only the cover and last page, but we digress.

We really enjoyed and appreciated this children's book!

Check it out on Amazon!