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

Do you know what a CAFO is? I confess that I did. I learned it from reading The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan but I did not know what a locavore was or that it was chosen as 2007's word of the year by The New Oxford American Dictionary. I also had no clue what the 100 Mile Diet was, though in retrospect, it should be pretty easy to figure out.

I have been fascinated with the subject of additives to our foods and a more natural way of eating for quite some time. That is what lead me to read books on the subject. With this book, Barbara Kingsolver has written in a fascinating and approachable way about what it means to really know your food sources. However, it's about more than just that. It's about working for and truly enjoying your food, not just settling for the closest and fastest thing available. It's about being connected to the community that labors together to produce, savoring the best that the seasons have to offer and not taking it all for granted.

There are recipes, informative sidebars written by her husband, Steven Hopp, and sections by her daughter Camille that share a young person's perspective on being raised and living this way. In fact, the best parts of the book for me were about how this all tied in as a family experience. Everyone does their part and enjoys gathering together to perform the work, however difficult it is, as well as reap the benefits.

There were some areas where I didn't agree with the author due to philosophical differences but, overall, I loved this book!

I enjoyed this book! The writing style was easy, informative and very motivational! What a neat topic to research for a year. This an easy and comfortable book to curl up with. I hope it changes the world! I recommend it for the health of your family and the planet!

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.