Animal, Vegetable, Miracle Author: Barbara Kingsolver | Language: English | ISBN:
B000QTD62Y | Format: PDF
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle Description
Bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver returns with her first nonfiction narrative that will open your eyes in a hundred new ways to an old truth: You are what you eat.
"As the U.S. population made an unprecedented mad dash for the Sun Belt, one carload of us paddled against the tide, heading for the Promised Land where water falls from the sky and green stuff grows all around. We were about to begin the adventure of realigning our lives with our food chain.
"Naturally, our first stop was to buy junk food and fossil fuel. . . ."
Hang on for the ride: With characteristic poetry and pluck, Barbara Kingsolver and her family sweep readers along on their journey away from the industrial-food pipeline to a rural life in which they vow to buy only food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it. Their good-humored search yields surprising discoveries about turkey sex life and overly zealous zucchini plants, en route to a food culture that's better for the neighborhood and also better on the table. Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle makes a passionate case for putting the kitchen back at the center of family life and diversified farms at the center of the American diet.
"This is the story of a year in which we made every attempt to feed ourselves animals and vegetables whose provenance we really knew . . . and of how our family was changed by our first year of deliberately eating food produced from the same place where we worked, went to school, loved our neighbors, drank the water, and breathed the air."
Includes an excerpt from Flight Behavior.
- File Size: 1163 KB
- Print Length: 403 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0060852569
- Publisher: HarperCollins e-books (October 13, 2009)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B000QTD62Y
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #14,856 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #4
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in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Crafts, Hobbies & Home > Gardening & Horticulture > Techniques > Organic - #18
in Books > Crafts, Hobbies & Home > Gardening & Landscape Design > By Technique > Organic - #19
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Biographies & Memoirs > Arts & Literature > Authors
Three hundred and sixty-eight pages, no pretty pictures, and it's about food? Yes it is, and it's fascinating. Written by best-selling novelist Barbara Kingsolver, her scientist hubby and teenage daughter, "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" chronicles the true story of the family's adventures as they move to a farm in rural Virginia and vow to eat locally for one year. They grow their own vegetables, raise their own poultry and buy the rest of their food directly from farmers markets and other local sources. There are touching human stories here (the family's 9-year-old learns a secret to raising chickens for food: don't name them!) but the book's purpose is serious food for thought: it argues the economic, social and health benefits of putting local foods at the center of a family diet. As Kingsolver details the family's experience month-by-month, husband Steven adds sidebars on the problems of industrial agriculture and daughter Camille tosses in some first-person essays ("Growing Up in the Kitchen") and recipes ("Holiday Corn Pudding a Nine-Year-Old Can Make").
And it is all so well written! Kingsolver can veer way off topic -- wandering off into subjects like rural politics, even turkey sex -- and still, somehow, stay right on point. Her husband can say more in two pages than some professors I know can say in 200, and the daughter's writings... well I often couldn't tell who was writing what without checking for the byline.
The book looks and feels great, too. The dust jacket has been pressed into the nubby texture of burlap. The pages have ragged edges, which makes them soft on your fingers.
I work in large-scale, corporate agriculture. Over the years I have worked for chemical companies, seed companies, grower-shippers and allied industries. I have recommended Kingsolver's novel "The Poisonwood Bible" to many of my colleagues. I have also endorsed Pollan's "Ominovore's Dilemma", having bought several copies and distributed them around. I very much enjoyed Kingsolver's "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life". It contained all the wit and humor I would expect from one of this nation's finest novelists. I think this book as well as Pollan's are a bit weak in the plant science area and I think both lack some of the insights into the machinations that really drive some of the food production industries. Then, again their intended audience is not the readers of TAG: Theoretical and the Applied Genetics, it is the populace at large. I very much agree with the sentiment of eating local, of shopping local, and of the slow food movement. It puts money back into the local community, it fosters a sense of community and it improves the quality of our diets. What is local though? Many of the fruits and vegetables eaten during Kingsolver's year of eating locally do not have Virginia as their center of origin. Some purists might cry foul. But, I think the focus needs to be on breaking the transport chain. People need to rediscover what a fresh peach or tomato is supposed to taste like, and their proper season. The bulk of the 'civilized' world buy their food at a chain grocery store dominated by one of the multinational grocery conglomerates. You think you have a choice when you walk into the store? You do not. That choice was made by a buyer probably at some regional DC (distribution center) who purchased the fruit from a packing shed sight unseen, and certainly did not taste it.
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