Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver
Pub Date: May 2007
384 pgs.
Novelist Kingsolver recounts a year spent eating food that is home grown, or, if not that, locally grown. Accomplished gardeners, the Kingsolver clan grow a large garden in southern Appalachia and spend summers “putting food by” as the classic kitchen title goes. They make pickles, chutney, and mozzarella; they jar tomatoes, braid garlic and stuff turkey sausage. Nine-year old Lily runs a heritage poultry business, selling eggs and meat. What they don’t raise, (lamb, beef, apples) comes from local farms. Come winter, they feast on root crops, and canned goods, menus slouching towards asparagus. Along the way, the family, having given up industrial meat years before, abandons its vegetarian ways and discovers the pleasures of conscientious canivory. -Publishers Weekly
Page after page my appreciation and awareness of where food is grown, and all the hands involved in its production is heightened. And, I am only at Chapter 4! I look forward to the pages ahead…