Animal, vegetable, miracle: A year of food life, by Barbara Kingsolver, with Steven L.Hopp and Camille Kingsolver. Published by Harper Collins.

A year of food life by Barbara Kingsolver and with contributions by her husband and older daughter, with her younger daughter also playing a big part in the story. This as you can see is a family adventure into living courageously. Together they pledge to eat only food that they either grow themselves or know who did (with exceptions, such as coffee, purchasing only fair trade).

I have cross posted this review over at TreeHugger, there I concentrated on its eco/green characteristics, here however I wanted to show whip up readers this book, because of the living creatively aspect of this book. It is a book about getting back to basics, making, doing, growing, eating from scratch. And the involvement of the whole family, was of course necessary, but also inspiring to see how the children totally embrace this lifestyle change, giving up junk food and other such ‘luxuries’ but replacing them with the wonders of home grown produce, learning to make their own cheese and yoghurt (I have been making yoghurt with my daughter too, with great success, and in fact this book inspired the recent getting back to basics posts that have been appearing on whipup lately), and cooking their own bread everyday.

Growing and eating their own produce includes animals too, with excellent chapters on the history of breeding eating turkeys, a restaurant that uses only local produce and the changes in small independent farming. Explorations in food includes making cheese, organising a party for over a hundred people using only produce from neighbouring farms, the romance of the first asparagus of the season and the practicalities of raising chickens.

The everyday life on the farm is intermingled with Barbara’s intense, passionate and well researched history and knowledge of food production and fuel consumption in America, Camille’s teenage viewpoint and recipes, and Steven’s deeper investigations of certain subjects. It is the whole package that makes this story work; a families life adventure turned into a family project of writing the book.

Full of irony, wit and love this book is a must read for anyone interested in growing their own food and everyone else interested in how the food they eat arrives at their table and the consequences of our indulgences for the planet. This book is at times very intense, while reading it I had such highs and lows, Barbara really sometimes paints a disastrous picture for our planets future, but then brings the reader back with good news stories. Most of this information is in my consciousness, however reading it all in one place with such passion and readability made it all very real for me. I hope that everyone can read this book and that it changes your views about what you put on your table and feed your family and how you live your life just a little bit.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 8th, 2007 at 7:16 am and is filed under eco+recycling, reviews+literature+media. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be moderated but will appear as soon as humanly possible.