Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life.

Kingsolver, Barbara (author).

Related Features

Living the American consumerist’s good life in Arizona’s desert makes abundantly obvious how everyday existence depends on nearly limitless consumption of fossil fuel. It’s not just the ubiquitous automobile guzzling gas. Even more gas is consumed by trucks that must deliver most foodstuffs, since so very little of what Arizonans eat grows locally. Those plants that manage to thrive in the desert fields require irrigation through massive diversion of rivers. Despite their genuine love of life in the Southwest, the Kingsolver family moved back to reconnect with ancestral roots in Appalachia, to a farm that has been in the author’s family for years. There they have at least some chance of re-creating a profounder and more intimate relationship with the foods they put on the table. Kingsolver’s passionate new tome records in detail a year lived in sync with the season’s ebb and flow. Starting with spring’s first asparagus, summer’s chickens, and the fall’s surfeit of vegetables, Kingsolver’s family consumes what they and their farming neighbors produce. Writing with her usual sharp eye for irony, she urges readers to follow her example and reconnect with their food’s source. To that end, she provides a bibliography, Web sites, and a listing of organizations supporting sustainable agriculture.