Animal, Vegetable, Miracle By Barbra Kingsolver - 1485 Words

After realizing that all of the food and water consumed by their family was either piped, shipped, or driven to them in the middle of the desert, novelist Barbra Kingsolver and her family decided to pick up their lives and move from Tucson, Arizona to to her childhood home of tobacco and dairy farms in southern Appalachia. Kingsolver and her family intended to spend the next year living in a more connected way to their food and where it comes from, and this book is the result of that experience. Part journal, part academic inquest, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, tells the story of their project to live sustainably in a place â€Å"where rain falls, crops grow, and drinking water bubbles right up out of the ground† (p. 3). Their year would consist†¦show more content†¦There is way too much fascinating information to unpack in this book - 99% of the 400 million turkeys consumed in America annually are artificially inseminated by humans! (p. 90). And we totally misundersta nd lactose intolerance (p. 136-37). One would have to read this book one hundred times over to fully critique its value. But it is good! Great even. There is so much to learn about the world and how food systems affect climate change and how climate change affects ecosystems and all living things. Kingsolver provides a tool for change through this book by suggesting ways of living that reduce our harmful footprint on the earth. She does this by sharing her story of eating locally for a year and pairing those stories with loaded insights about how the current industrial food and farm systems are ultimately destroying the world. At the very least this book should cause people who have not before, to stop and evaluate their participation in this industrial food system. Their actions and inactions may even be changed by their uncomfortable awareness of how most of us are eating. Kingsolver makes a very good point when writing about her search for fresh fruit during a season when fruit doesn t grow. She makes the reader aware of the fact that shopping for fruits and veggies out of season means we are impatient. To really make this point stick, she adds another commonly shared