Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
by Barbara Kingsolver, Camille Kingsolver and Steven L. Hopp

Summary

From zucchini larceny to smashing pumpkins to where fish wear crowns, what happens when a family vows to eat only food from their own neighborhood for one entire year? Barbara Kingsolver's whole family participated in both the experiment and the book. "A lovely book" says the Los Angeles Times. "One wants with all one's heart to sit with [Kingsolver] on the porch at the end of the day and shell peas."

Author Barbara Kingsolver and her family decided to opt out of the industrial-food pipeline. They vowed that for one year, they'd only buy food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it. Why? Because Americans put almost as much fossil fuel into our refrigerators as our cars.Yes, think tractors, combines, harvesters, irrigation ... and think synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides ... but the lion's share of fuel consumption is the trip from the farm to your plate. Each food item in a typical U.S. meal has traveled an average of 1500 miles.

If every U.S. citizen ate just one meal a week (any meal) composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce, we would reduce our country's oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels of oil every week. That's not gallons, but barrels. Small changes in buying habits can make big differences. Becoming a less energy-dependent nation may just start with a good breakfast.

"This is the story," says Kingsolver, "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." Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is an enthralling narrative that will open your eyes in a hundred new ways to an old truth: you are what you eat.

PRAISE:

"This book will change your life ... Perhaps never before has [food] been written about so passionately." — Boston Sunday Globe

"A hybrid book ... part memoir ... part call to action, part education, part recipe collection ... Animal, Vegetable Miracle makes an important contribution to the chorus of voices calling for change." — Chicago Tribune

"Homespun, unassuming, informed, positive, inspiring, zealously devoted to home and hearth ... often wisecracking humorous ... unstinting in its concerns about this imperiled planet and the impact of extravagant American lifestyles." — Seattle Post-Intelligencer

About the Author:

Barbara Kingsolver's bestselling books of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction include Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and the novels The Bean Trees and The Poisonwood Bible. Translated into nineteen languages, her work has won a devoted worldwide readership and many awards, including the National Humanities Medal, our country's highest honor for service through the arts. Kingsolver lives with her family on a farm in southwestern Virginia.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle Web Site

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