Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
author Barbara Kingsolver returns with her first nonfiction narrative that will open your eyes in a hundred new ways to an old truth: You are what you eat."As the U.S. population made an unprecedented mad dash for the Sun Belt, one carload of us paddled against the tide, heading for the Promised Land where water falls from the sky and green stuff grows all around. We were about to begin the adventure of realigning our lives with our food chain."Naturally, our first stop was to buy junk food and fossil fuel...."Hang on for the ride: With characteristic poetry and pluck, Barbara Kingsolver and her family sweep readers along on their journey away from the industrial-food pipeline to a rural life in which they vow to buy only food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it. Their good-humored search yields surprising discoveries about turkey sex life and overly zealous zucchini plants, en route to a food culture that's better for the neighborhood and also better on the table. Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle makes a passionate case for putting the kitchen back at the center of family life and diversified farms at the center of the American diet."This is the story of a year in which we made every attempt to feed ourselves animals and vegetables whose provenance we really knew...
Stats for nerds
2recommend
3mentions
2people
2012–2022years
100% recommend
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- So many great books I’ve enjoyed are mentioned here. And it’s hard to pick just one that’s changed my life, many have.
But in the interest of variety in this thread, I’ll throw out Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. It inspired me to go deeper in my beloved cooking practice towards growing food and hunting, and through all that I’ve found much gratitude for and understanding of life and what humanity has gone through to get us to this point.
Over a decade later and I’m still working towards a simpler and more fulfilling lifestyle.
- Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. Documents a year of her and her family living in Appalachia, totally self-sustaining. Changed the way I think about consumerism and industrialization.
- I'm a little late to this party, but most of the conversation here has centered our not cleaning your plate, but that is hardly the crux of the problem. Most of the waste happens through the supply chain, from farmers not bring "ugly" produce to the distributors, to food spoilage during transportation, to prepared foods that don't get purchased at the store.
My friend wrote a great book about this last year:
http://www.americanwastelandbook.com/
Since reading this book and Barbara Kingsolvers "Animal Vegetable Miracle" my family gets our food almost exclusively from the farmers market or directly from a farm via a farmshare.
