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."