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Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
by Barbara Kingsolver, Camille Kingsolver, Steven L. Hopp
excerpt | audio excerpt
Buy it
Paperback 0060852569
14.95
Hardcover 0060852550
26.95
Audiobook 0060853573
39.95
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Now Available in Paperback! Bestselling 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 . . . and of how our family was changed by our first year of deliberately eating food produced from the same place where we worked, went to school, loved our neighbors, drank the water, and breathed the air."
"With... assistance from her husband, Steven, and 19-year-old daughter, Camille, Kingsolver elegantly chronicles a year of back-to-the-land living with her family in Appalachia…Readers frustrated with the unhealthy, artificial food chain will take heart and inspiration here."
-- Kirkus Reviews
Excerpt
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
Called Home
As the U.S. population made a statistical mad dash for the Sun Belt, one carload of
us jumped off that ship and headed for the promised land, where water falls
from the sky and green stuff grows all around. Our family was 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.
In a cinderblock convenience mart we
foraged the aisles for road food. Our family’s natural-foods teenager scooped
up a pile of energy bars big enough to pass as a retirement plan for a
hamster. As long as we were going crazy here, we threw in some 99-cent bottles
of what comes for free out of drinking fountains in Perrier, France. In our present location 99 cents was a bargain. Arizona was suffering the worst drought in
its history – one inch of rainfall in the last seven months. Living in Arizona on borrowed water had begun to make
me nervous. So did importing all our food from elsewhere; the average food
item on a U.S. grocery shelf has traveled farther
than most families go on their annual vacations. Because of modern industrial
farming methods and the jet-traveled foods we buy, Americans put approximately
as much gasoline into our diets as into our cars.
As we gathered our loot on the
counter, the sky suddenly darkened. After 200 consecutive cloudless days, you
forget what it looks like when a cloud crosses the sun. We all blinked. The
cashier frowned toward the plate glass window.
"Dang," she said, "if it isn’t going to rain."
"I hope so," Steven said.
She turned her scowl from the window
to Steven. This bleached-blonde guardian of gas pumps and snack food was not
amused. "It better not, is all I can say."
"But we need it," I pointed out. I
am not one to argue with cashiers, but this was my very last minute as a
Tucsonan. I hated to jinx it with bad precipitation-karma.
"I know that’s what they’re saying,
but I don’t care," she avowed. "Tomorrow’s my first day off in two weeks, and
I want to wash my car."
For three hundred miles we drove that
day through desperately parched Sonoran badlands, chewing our salty cashews
with a peculiar guilt. We had all shared this wish, in some way or another:
that it wouldn’t rain on our day off. Thunderheads dissolved ahead of us, as
if honoring our compatriot’s desire to wash her car as the final benediction on
a dying land. In our desert, we would not see rain again.
* * *
At the end of our first full day in
our new home, we headed into town for supper. Ten hours of unpacking had left
us too tired to cook. We opted for a little diner of the southern type that
puts grits on your plate until noon, and
biscuits after, whether you ask for them or not. Our waitress was young and
chatty, a student at the junior college nearby studying to be a nurse or else,
if she doesn’t pass the chemistry, a television broadcaster. She said she was
looking forward to the weekend, but smiled broadly nevertheless at the clouds
gathering over the hills outside. The pastures of southwestern Virginia looked remarkably green to our
desert-scorched eyes, but the forests and fields were suffering here too.
Drought had plagued most of the southern U.S.
that spring.
A crack of thunder boomed, and the
rain let loose just as the waitress came back to clear our plates. "Listen at
that," she clucked. "Don’t we need it. Let’s hope it’s a good long one."
For our family, something turned over
that evening in the diner: a gas-pump cashier’s curse of drought was lifted by
a waitress’s simple, agricultural craving for rain. I thought to myself:
there is hope for us.
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