Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
A Year of Food Life
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4.4 • 87 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
At long last, the bestselling author of Small Miracles and The Poisonwood Bible returns with the wise and compelling true story of her family’s adventure to reclaim the food they eat
America has long been a nation of farmers. But within the past several decades, our food supply has become dependent on transportation that burns fossil fuels and on increasingly fewer varieties of vegetables and animals. In a single generation, most Americans have lost their knowledge of agriculture and the natural processes that are a part of our food chain. But while food is cheap we pay for it in other ways, including shorter life spans for our children, argues Barbara Kingsolver.
Determined to integrate their food choices with their family values, Kingsolver and her family moved from suburban Arizona to a rural Appalachia, and embarked on an adventure of realigning their lives with the food chain. Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle follows them through the first year of their experiment.
Told in the compelling voices of the Kingsolver family, it recalls their experiences, and introduces other passionate, committed citizens who are trying to turn the tide in their communities, from organic farmers to members of the Slow Food movement who are doing their best to protect our foods against extinction and return us to a way of life that is better for our health, our wallets, and our environment.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Reviewed by Nina PlanckMichael Pollan is the crack investigator and graceful narrator of the ecology of local food and the toxic logic of industrial agriculture. Now he has a peer. Novelist Kingsolver recounts a year spent eating home-grown food and, if not that, local. Accomplished gardeners, the Kingsolver clan grow a large garden in southern Appalachia and spend summers "putting food by," as the classic kitchen title goes. They make pickles, chutney and mozzarella; they jar tomatoes, braid garlic and stuff turkey sausage. Nine-year-old Lily runs a heritage poultry business, selling eggs and meat. What they don't raise (lamb, beef, apples) comes from local farms. Come winter, they feast on root crops and canned goods, menus slouching toward asparagus. Along the way, the Kingsolver family, having given up industrial meat years before, abandons its vegetarian ways and discovers the pleasures of conscientious carnivory.This field local food and sustainable agriculture is crowded with books in increasingly predictable flavors: the earnest manual, diary of an epicure, the environmental battle cry, the accidental gardener. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is all of these, and much smarter. Kingsolver takes the genre to a new literary level; a well-paced narrative and the apparent ease of the beautiful prose makes the pages fly. Her tale is both classy and disarming, substantive and entertaining, earnest and funny. Kingsolver is a moralist ("the conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners"), but more often wry than pious. Another hazard of the genre is snobbery. You won't find it here. Seldom do paeans to heirloom tomatoes (which I grew up selling at farmers' markets) include equal respect for outstanding modern hybrids like Early Girl.Kingsolver has the ear of a journalist and the accuracy of a naturalist. She makes short, neat work of complex topics: what's risky about the vegan diet, why animals belong on ecologically sound farms, why bitterness in lettuce is good. Kingsolver's clue to help greenhorns remember what's in season is the best I've seen. You trace the harvest by botanical development, from buds to fruits to roots. Kingsolver is not the first to note our national "eating disorder" and the injuries industrial agriculture wreaks, yet this practical vision of how we might eat instead is as fresh as just-picked sweet corn. The narrative is peppered with useful sidebars on industrial agriculture and ecology (by husband Steven Hopp) and recipes (by daughter Camille), as if to show that local food in the growing, buying, cooking, eating and the telling demands teamwork. Nina Planck is the author of Real Food: What to Eat and Why (Bloomsbury USA, 2006).
Customer Reviews
This review says it all....
I love this book so much I re-read it every year.
I'm hooked!
This was my first kingsolver book and it convinced me to read all her others. I loved the narrative, it inspired me to shop local and start my own garden!
Food for thought
No pun intended, but this book is eye opening. I really hate grocery shopping and really never gave much thought to where our food is coming from, especially in off seasons. Living in New England, there are lots of farmers markets during the summer, but in the winter, we are at the mercy of produce being trucked from the west coast or worse, outside of our country. This book makes you think about using what is in season and making changes that will help our environment. Not many of us could do what the author did, living off their land and producing just about all they ate for a year, but we can all start doing our part. It does take time, thought and planning. The reason I didn't give 5 stars is because I felt there was a lot of "filler" that really wasn't necessary in this book.