Books : Animal, Vegetable, Miracle LP
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 809
EAN: 9780061285295
Format: Large Print
ISBN: 0061285293
Label: HarperLuxe
Manufacturer: HarperLuxe
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 352
Publication Date: May 01, 2007
Publisher: HarperLuxe
Sales Rank: 1480954
Studio: HarperLuxe
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
Bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver returns with her first nonfiction narrative that will open your eyes in a hundred new ways to an old truth: You are what you eat.
"As the U.S. population made an unprecedented mad dash for the Sun Belt, one carload of us paddled against the tide, heading for the Promised Land where water falls from the sky and green stuff grows all around. We were about to begin the adventure of realigning our lives with our food chain.
"Naturally, our first stop was to buy junk food and fossil fuel. . . ."
Hang on for the ride: With characteristic poetry and pluck, 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. Their good-humored search yields surprising discoveries about turkey sex life and overly zealous zucchini plants, en route to a food culture that's better for the neighborhood and also better on the table. Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle makes a passionate case for putting the kitchen back at the center of family life and diversified farms at the center of the American diet.
"This is the story of a year in which we made every attempt to feed ourselves animals and vegetables whose provenance we really knew . . . and 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."
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
I listened to the audio version of this book--read by the author. It is wonderful. Barbara Kingsolver has a lovely voice and a charming sense of humor, and...her book is very well-written. She and her husband and daughter give a very intelligent, impactful rendering of the subject of growing one's own food, eating locally, sustainable farming...and the "negatives" of the con-agricultural biz. You will learn a lot and enjoy doing it because despite the fact that certain portions of the book are of necessity serious in nature, the book was also an entertaining and fun read!
Rating:  -
I have read all of Kingsolver's books, and greatly enjoyed them. This one was not so easy. My real problem with it was the assumption that we all have "family" to have meals with, cook with, and hang out in the kitchen or garden with. I would love that, but it just isn't the case, and I'm sure that is so for many others. So many are single person households now, with no family, or no family close by. So I guess I would have to say it brought into full focus how alone I feel. I agree with another reviewer that the slant is elitist. I agree with her eating recommendations for the most part, being vegetarian, organic, eating in season, local etc. I would give 5 stars to all her other books.
Rating: -
A friend in my book club recommended this and so I decided to read it not knowing too much about it. But as a mom of two young children, I had been feeling like I should focus on feeding them better. I thought this was just going to be a book about how living on vegetables for a year made them so healthy. But it was a fascinating and capitivating story because of not only what they went through during that year, but also because of her revealing insights into the food industry - how meat is produced for mass market, how hens are treated, how much energy is wasted by transporting produce across the country (and world), how large corporate farming is affecting local farming communities and the national economy. I closed the book feeling like I had been empowered with so much more knowledge about the food I have been putting into my body and was inspired to frequent my local farmer's market, grow my own summer garden, and be much more choosy about my meat and dairy products.
Rating: -
I've struggled with my weight for years which tells you that I've also struggled with food for the same time. I've recently let my underlying distaste (pun intended) for factory-farmed animals rise to the surface and am exploring other ways to eat that don't involve inhumane treatment for animals and the world we're putting at risk. Kinsolver's book was one I started, put aside as "too hard", picked up, put aside, and picked up again as I really got serious. I doubt I can ever emulate her experience, but I can certainly do better than I have done and, with the information in her book, I know I will be able to do better with practice and support. If you want to change your ways -- and defend the change to those who may question or even mock you -- this book will become a new pantry staple.
Rating:  -
The less you know about the food you eat, the more urgent your need to read this book. Organized around Kingsolver's family decision to eat-local for a year, the tale she tells is much larger--encompassing as it does the entire relationship between food, energy, nutrition, corporate agriculture, marketing, global climate change and the sexual habits of turkeys. The novelist brings all of her writerly experience to the task and she is at her best in barbed asides about the forces that force feed Americans with the manufactured crap that is now reducing our children's life expectancy.
On the other hand, if you are an organic grower, a slow-foodist, a farmer's market afficianado, a nutrition activist or a deep ecologist (a multiply redundant description, I'm sure), you will find less to learn here. Still, Kingsolver is fun. Add to that the instructive asides by her husband, environmentalist and naturalist Steven L. Hopp, and the observations and recipes from daughter Camille Kingsolver, and you are treated with a volume that wholly embodies the story it tells--a family writing about a family passion, learning together and living what they learn.
As I wrote in my book,Garden My Heart: Organic strategies for backyard sustainability "I have directed or redirected this sprawling patch, this tiny fragment of the vast network of living systems on our planet, eaten a little of the bounty and been intimately rejoined to life's miracle and power--all without toxics, ... Read More
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