Eating Trees is a rags-to-riches-to-rags story of an ordinary working guy who suddenly has an extraordinary idea.

Nick Cerelli has always been "big-boned," as he and his family refer to their tendency to put on weight. He works hard as a laborer but never seems to get ahead until he makes an observation one day while working on a construction job: Fine sawdust feels like flour.

"See, my big idea was to make some kinda diet Twinkie outta sawdust. Really. And why not? Lucky just showed me sawdust that looks and feels like flour! Fine enough to powder a baby's rear end. Talk about lucky!"

Knowing that sawdust can't be digested, he speculates that if he could somehow make an appetizing cookie out of the sawdust, he could cash in on the diet craze and finally make his fortune; dieters could enjoy the cookies and not put on weight unless, in his words, they were termites.

Nick enlists his friends and family in the scheme to invent an artificially flavored and sweetened sawdust cookie and starts up his own company, Beaver Brand. For a brief while, Beaver Brand becomes the latest Big Thing, and Nick and his crew get to experience the sweet taste of success until people eating too many of his delicious cookies start to have digestive issues.

Nick relates his story in the first person, speaking in the colorful dialect of his New York neighborhood. Anyone who has battled weight issues or dreamed of "hitting it big" will relate to and laugh at Nick's preposterous idea as he thinks it through and decides that this is it: This is going to be his ticket to the good life.