Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (P.S.)

You'd probably like this book if you're looking to introduce natural or organic food consumption into your every day like. For me, it was a waste of $9. It was a slow read and did not hold my interest.

This is a fascinating, insightful, well written and easy-to-read book explaining in detail how our dependency on food from global sources has made us that much more dependent on oil to have the food brought to us, and this is an extremely enlightening description of how we can rid ourselves of this fuel dependency as a society by changing things in our life through changing what we choose to eat, and deciding for ourselves what we will tolerate as far as how the food is distributed throughout the world, and from where. This book illuminates the facts of how simple food expectations that we are unaware of but are ingrained deeply into our social structures which connect to other people and societies through out the world, can be altered in ways that are dependent on US individually to make, not through our governments. It describes how our government, economy and the treatment of food starting from the creation of hybrid seeds, to the ability the seeds have to resist insects, to how it gets to us at the table, is intertwined in such a way that we can no longer have the capacity to grow naturally, or organically, on a global scale. It is frightening what has been done, yet there is still hope for us.

A fascinating account of a family's journey to live off the land--THEIR land. The discussion of how our food supply has changed in the last 50+ years and how it affects our health and our economy is excellent, something we all should be thinking about.

This is well written and very informative. In today's world we do need to take back some of the healthy past when it comes to food. This is a great teaching tool. I would recommend this book to everyone.

I love this book, I couldn't put it down. My husband and I have tended community gardens together for the past twenty years. However, the closest we came to the grand scale of personal food production described by Kingsolver was when we were graduate students in Ithaca, NY where we had our first garden, with over 20 tomato plants. I can relate to the tomatoes covering every square inch of available kitchen space.

Now, my 6 year old daughter and I have dreams of raising our own chickens, and I personally would like a goat. The only (perhaps not only) problems are that we live in a city in Southern California and the city rules ban roosters. And my husband is not as enthusiastic. I have ordered the recommended book on making one's own cheese and am excited to begin experimenting.

My only criticism of "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" is that there is no index for reference. It took me quite a while to re-locate the recipe for the green bean dip. I finally found it (I note that except for the basil it is not all that different from Mollie Katzen's vegetable-walnut pate) and made the dish even though I was on vacation in the mountains without a food-processor, but it was worth it.

I find myself wanting to locate other information that I read in this book, not a recipe, but short of re-reading the whole book, ... Barbara, please post a detailed index online!