Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

"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." -from inside book jacket-

I was inspired by some of Tach's reads about the food industry to do a little reading in this area too, figuring that I enjoy reading about cooking and nutrition, and this book was a pretty good introduction. Barbara Kingsolver is a fiction novelist so this non-fiction memoir about her family's commitment to eating only locally-grown food for one year was as engaging as a good fiction novel. It's a nice, broad read on the US food industry as it intersects with the farming industry and the politics, economics, and energy costs involved in bringing food to today's table, going into all kinds of topics such as local eating, food security, sustainable farming, food policy, organic versus conventional farming, fair trade, nutrition, big business, and preserving farming traditions and heirloom seeds. The book doesn't go into so much depth as to overwhelm you but I think it gives enough information to really motivate change and provides some good resources for further research, too.

If you're interested in the local food movement and understanding why it's important, this is a good book choice. If you are already well-read on this topic then maybe not so much. The authour undertook this project around the same time as other local food projects such as the authours of the 100 Mile Diet and Gary Paul Nabhan's local food project in the Arizona desert, but Kingsolver wanted to prove that you didn't have to be an extremist to eat local (that being said, some people might not consider homemade cheese-making and turkey-breeding exactly typical of the average person) and I would say that it is written for a general audience. I did find her to be a tad too earnest at times (y'know- such a noble, valiant quest and all) but I guess that comes with the enthusiasm of any new project. All in all a pretty good read!