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Title

• Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Author

• Barbara Kingsolver

Publisher

• Harper-Collins Publishers

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

A Year of Food Life

Overview

From the publisher

Bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver returns with her first nonfiction narrative about a hundred new ways of understanding 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,” Kingsolver writes. “Naturally, our first stop was to buy junk food and fossil fuel.”

With characteristic poetry and pluck, 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,” writes Kingsolver."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.”

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Building a local foodshed