Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life | Barbara Kingsolver, Camille Kingsolver, ... |...

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life | Barbara Kingsolver, Camille Kingsolver, ... | Inspiring!

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Animal, Vegetable,...

	Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life Barbara Kingsolver, Camille Kingsolver, ... HarperCollins, 2007 - 384 pages average customer review:based on 324 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Eat me!

Barbara Kingsolver's lyric prose is so fun to read, and it's good for you too! It's heartening to see the locavore movement get such attention on a national scale. Maybe American food culture isn't doomed after all. The inserts from her family are entertaining, but sometimes awkwardly placed. I can't wait to lend this out to my friends.

Inspiring!

I found this story fascinating and inspiring! I originally listened to this book as a download but had to buy a hard copy to loan out because I keep recommending it. If you are interested in learning more about the local food movement, sustainable farming/gardening, seasonal eating, etc... this book is for you. I have always been a city girl but six months after I read this book I was blessed with the opportunity to move to a nearby organic family farm and I love it!
Reading this book also caused me to check out Kingsolver's novels and I have really enjoyed those as well, especially The Bean Trees.

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Good annecdotes, light on facts

I enjoyed reading this book as a story about a family and how they chose to eat for a year. It certainly inspired me to cook more often, and to head to the farmer's market up the street a little more often. The sections I didn't like were those by Kingsolver and her husband broached bigger societal issues like subsidies for big agriculture companies, problems with feed lot animals, etc. These are all very real problems, but I wish the book had given more details, some statistics, references and footnotes from where her info came from, etc. Also, as a well-informed vegetarian of 17 years, I found the section about how vegetarians are all delusional to be very demeaning and her arguments weak.

Anyhow, read it for the family and farming story. But also pick up "The Omnivore's Dilemma" by Michael Pollan for a much better explanation of the bigger issues.

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Good message. Writing style gets in the way.

I love the message of this book but found the stream of consciousness writing style was a bit distracting. It was hard with all the side tracks to read this for more then short sessions although I was really pulling for the turkeys at the end. Barbara was also a bit heavy handed in her promotion of her friends who so happen to be offering this book on their web sites. I would have loved to found the reference for the source of the statement that is take 1.2 acres to grow food for one person today and in the year 2050 we will only have .6. That is a startling fact that I have found nothing to back it up. Barbara is pretty good for the most part in providing back up for statements. The other major puzzle was why the heck did she not buy her husband a flour mill so they could grind their own flour. They are not that expensive and fresh ground flour is so much more nutritious. Once milled wheat starts to break down as soon as oxygen and light to the expose kernel, plus all the driving around to find flour seems to be a serous waste of time.

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