- Hardcover: 384 pages
- Publisher: Harper (April 19 2007)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0060852550
- ISBN-13: 978-0060852559
- Product Dimensions: 15.6 x 3 x 22.9 cm
- Shipping Weight: 680 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
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Amazon Bestsellers Rank:
#71,014 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #8 in Books > Entertainment > Humour > Rural Life
- #75 in Books > Home & Garden > Gardening & Horticulture > Organic
- #85 in Books > Home & Garden > Sustainable Living
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. [Signature]Reviewed by Nina PlanckMichael Pollan is the crack investigator and graceful narrator of the ecology of local food and the toxic logic of industrial agriculture. Now he has a peer. Novelist Kingsolver recounts a year spent eating home-grown food and, if not that, local. Accomplished gardeners, the Kingsolver clan grow a large garden in southern Appalachia and spend summers "putting food by," as the classic kitchen title goes. They make pickles, chutney and mozzarella; they jar tomatoes, braid garlic and stuff turkey sausage. Nine-year-old Lily runs a heritage poultry business, selling eggs and meat. What they don't raise (lamb, beef, apples) comes from local farms. Come winter, they feast on root crops and canned goods, menus slouching toward asparagus. Along the way, the Kingsolver family, having given up industrial meat years before, abandons its vegetarian ways and discovers the pleasures of conscientious carnivory.This field—local food and sustainable agriculture—is crowded with books in increasingly predictable flavors: the earnest manual, diary of an epicure, the environmental battle cry, the accidental gardener. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is all of these, and much smarter. Kingsolver takes the genre to a new literary level; a well-paced narrative and the apparent ease of the beautiful prose makes the pages fly. Her tale is both classy and disarming, substantive and entertaining, earnest and funny. Kingsolver is a moralist ("the conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners"), but more often wry than pious. Another hazard of the genre is snobbery. You won't find it here. Seldom do paeans to heirloom tomatoes (which I grew up selling at farmers' markets) include equal respect for outstanding modern hybrids like Early Girl.Kingsolver has the ear of a journalist and the accuracy of a naturalist. She makes short, neat work of complex topics: what's risky about the vegan diet, why animals belong on ecologically sound farms, why bitterness in lettuce is good. Kingsolver's clue to help greenhorns remember what's in season is the best I've seen. You trace the harvest by botanical development, from buds to fruits to roots. Kingsolver is not the first to note our national "eating disorder" and the injuries industrial agriculture wreaks, yet this practical vision of how we might eat instead is as fresh as just-picked sweet corn. The narrative is peppered with useful sidebars on industrial agriculture and ecology (by husband Steven Hopp) and recipes (by daughter Camille), as if to show that local food—in the growing, buying, cooking, eating and the telling—demands teamwork. (May)Nina Planck is the author of Real Food: What to Eat and Why (Bloomsbury USA, 2006).
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From School Library Journal
Adult/High School–This book chronicles the year that Barbara Kingsolver, along with her husband and two daughters, made a commitment to become locavores–those who eat only locally grown foods. This first entailed a move away from their home in non-food-producing Tuscon to a family farm in Virginia, where they got right down to the business of growing and raising their own food and supporting local farmers. For teens who grew up on supermarket offerings, the notion not only of growing one's own produce but also of harvesting one's own poultry was as foreign as the concept that different foods relate to different seasons. While the volume begins as an environmental treatise–the oil consumption related to transporting foodstuffs around the world is enormous–it ends, as the year ends, in a celebration of the food that physically nourishes even as the recipes and the memories of cooks and gardeners past nourish our hearts and souls. Although the book maintains that eating well is not a class issue, discussions of heirloom breeds and making cheese at home may strike some as high-flown; however, those looking for healthful alternatives to processed foods will find inspiration to seek out farmers' markets and to learn to cook and enjoy seasonal foods. Give this title to budding Martha Stewarts, green-leaning fans of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth (Rodale, 2006), and kids outraged by Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation (Houghton, 2001).–Jenny Gasset, Orange County Public Library, CA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Most helpful customer reviews
22 of 22 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Incredible celebration of local food,
By
This review is from: Animal Vegetable Miracle (Paperback)
I already read this book and can't wait to buy my own copy and read it again. Barbara Kingsolver makes the topic of food riveting. Her family's journey to eat wholesome, local food is inspiring, informative and humorous. I laughed so hard reading about turkey sex. My friends and I talk about her book often and many of us are trying things that she wrote about; raising chickens, growing asparagus and more. The sections written by her husband and her daughter add greatly to the book. I especially appreciated her perspective on eating meat - I have struggled for years with wanting to be a vegetarian (which I was for 6 years) but not being able to feed my family well that way. With the Union for Concerned Scientists stating over and over that eating meat contributes to global warming, it was great to finally be able to distinguish for myself the difference between meat raised through large-scale agriculture vs. meat raised on small farms. It's a HUGE difference, one I wish the scientists would publicly acknowledge.
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Inspiring read,
By
This review is from: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (Hardcover)
I was surprised to learn that Kingsolver's latest book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, was non-fiction, and was very interested to find out how her novelist skills would translate to the non-fiction genre. In a word? Brilliantly.This latest book is timely, engaging and eye-opening. Although Kingsolver's story revolves around her own family and their move from their southwest home to Appalachia, the message of becoming socially conscious about ones food choices can be applied universally. Kingsolver makes the tough decision, not only to move her family to a completely new environment, but experiment with eating entirely locally for a year. They go about this by growing almost everything themselves as well as supporting their local farmers' market. It's not an easy experiment, and they all face their challenges. Kingsolver's husband, Steven, adds interesting facts about the state of the American food industry and their teenaged daughter Camille's contributions, which include delicious-sounding recipes, are fresh and engaging. What fans of Kingsolver will enjoy is her clever turn of phrase. She can make even produce and farming sound exciting, even whimsical. A fantastic read and highly recommended. It made me think twice about mindlessly adding tropical fruit to my grocery cart and lead me to plant asparagus for the first time in my garden! It is my hope that readers will be encouraged, as I was, to support our local farmers by eating seasonally and reap both the environmental and health benefits of conscious eating & living.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Not preachy, just good food!,
This review is from: Animal Vegetable Miracle (Paperback)
Great book! I'm generally a fiction reader with a short attention span for non-fiction, but this book was a page turner for me! I read it a couple of years ago and have since been motivated to start my own home garden. I've recommended it to others who all have raved about it!
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