Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (2008 original; edició 2007)

Kingsolver and her family decide to move permanently to Virginia from the Southwest and spend a year eating only what they can grow or get locally (with a very few exceptions, like olive oil). They have put thought and physical preparation into this project, and Kingsolver documents their decisions, their feelings, and their great affinity for the farmers' market, but as a master storyteller, she weaves it all into a seamless narrative. Her husband Steven Hopp contributes short, informative essays, and their older daughter Camille includes recipes (and provides a younger person's perspective). The youngest daughter, Lily, was too young to sign a book contract, but was fully invested in the family project and had her own egg business, with chickens she raised.

The Kingsolver family's project makes a solid case for eating locally as much as possible, for reasons of climate (transporting food takes a lot of fossil fuels), animal welfare (CAFOs are terrible for the environment and the animals), and supporting the community in which you live.

See also: Once Upon A Time We Ate Animals

Recipes: http://animalvegetablemiracle.com

Quotes

Consider how Americans might respond to a proposal that agriculture was to become a mandatory subject in all schools, alongside reading and mathematics. (9)

...U.S. farmers now produce 3,900 calories per U.S. citizen, per day. That is twice what we need, and 700 calories a day more than they grew in 1980. (14)

Obesity is generally viewed as a failure of personal resolve, with no acknowledgment of the genuine conspiracy in this historical scheme. (15)

At its heart, genuine food culture is an affinity between people and the land that feeds them. (20)

...eating home-cooked meals from whole, in-season ingredients obtained from the most local source available is eating well, in every sense. Good for the habitat, good for the body. (31)

Most standard vegetable varieties sold in stores have been bred for uniform appearance, mechanized harvest, convenience of packing...and a tolerance for hard travel. None of these can be mistaken, in practice, for actual flavor. (48)

You can't save the whales by eating whales, but paradoxically, you can help save rare, domesticated foods by eating them. (56)

If many of us would view this style of eating as deprivation, that's only because we've grown accustomed to the botanically outrageous condition of having everything, always. (65)

...the manner in which we're allowed to steal from future generations....The conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners. (67)

Grocery money is an odd sticking point for U.S. citizens, who on average spend a lower proportion of income on food than people in any other country....It's interesting that penny-pinching is an accepted defense for toxic food habits, when frugality so rarely rules other consumer domains. (115)

"Certified organic" does not necessarily mean sustainably grown, worker-friendly, fuel-efficient, cruelty-free, or any other virtue a consumer might wish for. (121)

Cheese Queen Ricki Carroll (132-133)

Buying your goods from local businesses rather than national chains generates about three times as much money for your local economy. (149)

...the world's most efficient psychological evaluation would have just the one question: Define splurge. (162)

Weed is, after all, an arbitrary designation - a plant growing where you don't want it. (173)

Doesn't the Federal Farm Bill help out all these poor farmers?
No. It used to, but ever since its inception just after the Depression, the Federal Farm Bill has slowly been altered by agribusiness lobbyists. It is now largely corporate welfare. (206)

It never really stops, this business of growing things....Food is not a product but a process, and it never sleeps. It just goes underground for a while. (270)

Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing. (287)

Holiday Corn Pudding recipe (293)

The dominant culture has a way of becoming more real than the stuff at hand. (296)

The big savings come from a habit of organizing meals that don't include pricey processed additions. (307)

All stories, they say, begin in one of two ways: "A stranger came to town," or else, "I set out upon a journey." (335) [For source, see: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/05/06/two-plots/]

Altered routines were really at the heart of what we'd gained. (342)

We so want to believe it's possible to come back from our saddest mistakes, and have another chance. (345) ( )

For all that this book represents a 3-person diatribe against modern food practices, it manages to be inspiring, interesting and very accessible. It feels to me like a toolbox for thinking about nutrition from a variety of viewpoints, and I keep coming back to it again and again. ( )

I really enjoyed this book, as eating local foods is quickly becoming a passion of mine. I listened to the audiobook, read by the authors (her husband and daughter wrote parts of it) and found it well-written and interesting. I will try one of her novels next. It also had an interview of the author at the end which I also enjoyed. ( )

Woman moves her family from Tucson to pursue a life of a "loco-vore". She wanted to know if she could survive a year living on food only locally grown -and she did.

She's a fun little writer filled with wit and charm. You learn a lot about our current food industrial system system that depends on oil. She introduces exotic vegetables that make your mouth water and weaves an endearing story about raising turkeys.

I docked the book a star just because it just seemed long. It's probably more of a 3.5 star book to me. Not sure exactly where to cut it but as I neared the end of the book I remember thinking ... ANOTHER CHAPTER?!

Still any book that makes me want to make my own cheese, has to be worth something.

( )

I read the book, because I was curious how a family can eat locally. I thought I would find some tips. Instead there was nothing I didn't already know from other books. The basic message was: it is a lot of work. I found the tone very self congratulatory. I didn't finish it because I was sick of it. ( )