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!

Diamond Grill - by Fred Wah

Fred Wah is a western Canadian authour who has written a number of books. Diamond Grill is published by NeWest Press (Edmonton), which also published books by Thomas Wharton and Hiromi Goto- that may be where I first heard of Fred Wah because I like to look for books by Canadian authours, I think because I enjoy recognizing the familiar landscapes. Diamond Grill is the authour's memoir about working in his family's Chinese restaurant in the 1950's in Nelson, BC. It is really more of a collection of memories, each one ranging from a half-page to a couple of pages, gathered together to form a story. I read the book years ago and remember enjoying it and wanted to reread it being more familiar with Nelson now. There isn't much focus on the setting, as the novel is concerned more with the cafe's daily rhythms, the authour's memories of his father, the role of ancestry in identity, and the authour's feelings of not quite fitting in anywhere, feeling neither white enough nor Chinese enough but rather somewhere in the middle. This was the first book of Wah's that I read and I really enjoyed it; I believe (can't remember which) I've read others of his and found them also to be very good.

It was also fun to glean a few tidbits of life in Nelson in the 50's, such as that there were a half a dozen Chinese restaurants in town (where did they go?) and a Chinatown area on Lake Street; Wait's News got the first soft-serve ice cream machine in 1953, and there was once a Kootenay Tofu company sometime around the 60's or 70's (no longer in existence so far as I can tell and not associated with Silver King). A good, quick read!

Border Passage: From Cairo to America- One Woman's Journey - Leila Ahmed

I read this book awhile ago but really enjoyed it so I thought I'd post it. It was really interesting to get insight on a culture and country that I know so little about- those being the Arab culture and Egypt. The memoir of the author, and Egyptian-American feminist and Women's Studies professor, is truly an opus of insight on discrimination by race, gender, religion, politics, and class and how our experiences and familial, cultural, religious, and educational environment shape our reality and our attitudes. This non-western, female perspective on colonialism, politics, religion, the rise of the Arab identity, and the attitudes of westerners towards non-western cultures is both shocking and humbling in its acuity and depth. It was truly wonderful to read such intelligent and well-thought out views on such a broad range of topics- a dense read that is at the same time so very engaging and readable.