By Barbara Kingsolver
(Review by Sue Mayfield-Geiger)
Have you ever stopped and thought about the fact
that the food we eat (purchased from supermarkets)
has traveled more miles than most of us travel on
vacation? Not to mention the fuel consumption
needed for transportation, chemicals/pesticides used
in growing, industrial processing plants, packaging
and handling. A typical meal travels 1,500 miles to the dinner table.
We have become a society of convenience. American citizens spend
less of their income on food than has any culture in the history of the
world. Due to our modern industrial food supply, Americans are now
raising the first generation of children to have a shorter life expectancy
than their parents.
Writer Barbara Kingsolver and
her family moved from the Arizona
desert to rural Virginia in 2004.
Their mission: to spend a year on a
locally produced diet, paying close
attention to the provenance of all
they consumed. "We wanted to live in
a place that could feed us: where rain
falls, crops grow, and drinking water
bubbles right up out of the ground,”
she explains. “Our highest shopping
goal was to get our food from so close
to home, we'd know the person who
grew it. Often that turned out to be
ourselves as we learned to produce
what we needed, starting with dirt,
seeds, and enough knowledge to
muddle through. Or starting with
baby animals, and enough sense to
refrain from naming them."
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle follows the family through the first year of
their experiment. They move away from the typical American family
menus and opt for food grown from local farms as well as naturally processed foods. They even become farmers and canners themselves, making pickles, chutney and mozzarella; they jar tomatoes, braid garlic and stuff turkey sausage. Come winter, they feast on root crops and canned goods.
Kingsolver and her family set out to prove for themselves that a local diet is not just better for the economy and environment but also better on the table. They go through a season of planting, pulling weeds, exploring farmers' markets and diversified organic farms near and far. Kingsolver’s husband (Steven Hopp) notes: If we all ate just one meal each week made of locally raised organic meat
and produce, we could reduce our
country’s oil consumption by over 1.1
million barrels of oil per week.
After reading this book, you
will no doubt want to move the
dining room table into the kitchen
and roll up your sleeves.
Animal,
Vegetable, Miracle
will certainly inspire
you to rethink the food chain.
(Barbara Kingsolver is the author
of twelve books, including:
The Bean
Trees, Animal Dreams, Pigs in Heaven,
The Poisonwood Bible,
and Prodigal
Summer. Kingsolver and her family
live on their farm in southwestern
Virginia where they raise free-range
chickens, turkeys, Icelandic sheep,
and an enormous vegetable garden.)
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