Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life [B0353-HC]

2007 HCDJ in nice clean condition. 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, enroute 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."

From recent Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "I started a community garden right before I picked up this book, and the act of growing food for the first time in my life only made my reading experience more enjoyable. Kingsolver’s writing is incredibly beautiful, witty and informational all at the same time. I learned a lot of new (to me) information about America’s food systems and how they shape what we eat but I also laughed out loud multiple times. I highly recommend this to anyone with an interest in food (aka everyone)."; "Read it years ago. Now gifting it to my brother, the gardener in the family."; "FABULOUS! Entertaining! Great humor and practical knowledge combined."