Author Barbara Kingsolver and her family abandoned the industrial-food pipeline to live a rural life—vowing that, for one year, they’d only buy food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it. Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is an enthralling narrative that will open your eyes in a hundred new ways to an old truth: You are what you eat.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Surprisingly Inspirational!
Comment: A friend in my book club recommended this and so I decided to read it not knowing too much about it. But as a mom of two young children, I had been feeling like I should focus on feeding them better. I thought this was just going to be a book about how living on vegetables for a year made them so healthy. But it was a fascinating and capitivating story because of not only what they went through during that year, but also because of her revealing insights into the food industry - how meat is produced for mass market, how hens are treated, how much energy is wasted by transporting produce across the country (and world), how large corporate farming is affecting local farming communities and the national economy. I closed the book feeling like I had been empowered with so much more knowledge about the food I have been putting into my body and was inspired to frequent my local farmer's market, grow my own summer garden, and be much more choosy about my meat and dairy products.

---

Customer Rating:
Summary: Guided my thinking about what/how to eat
Comment: I've struggled with my weight for years which tells you that I've also struggled with food for the same time. I've recently let my underlying distaste (pun intended) for factory-farmed animals rise to the surface and am exploring other ways to eat that don't involve inhumane treatment for animals and the world we're putting at risk. Kinsolver's book was one I started, put aside as "too hard", picked up, put aside, and picked up again as I really got serious. I doubt I can ever emulate her experience, but I can certainly do better than I have done and, with the information in her book, I know I will be able to do better with practice and support. If you want to change your ways -- and defend the change to those who may question or even mock you -- this book will become a new pantry staple.

---

Customer Rating:
Summary: Hand to mind to mouth
Comment: The less you know about the food you eat, the more urgent your need to read this book. Organized around Kingsolver's family decision to eat-local for a year, the tale she tells is much larger--encompassing as it does the entire relationship between food, energy, nutrition, corporate agriculture, marketing, global climate change and the sexual habits of turkeys. The novelist brings all of her writerly experience to the task and she is at her best in barbed asides about the forces that force feed Americans with the manufactured crap that is now reducing our children's life expectancy.

On the other hand, if you are an organic grower, a slow-foodist, a farmer's market afficianado, a nutrition activist or a deep ecologist (a multiply redundant description, I'm sure), you will find less to learn here. Still, Kingsolver is fun. Add to that the instructive asides by her husband, environmentalist and naturalist Steven L. Hopp, and the observations and recipes from daughter Camille Kingsolver, and you are treated with a volume that wholly embodies the story it tells--a family writing about a family passion, learning together and living what they learn.

As I wrote in my book,Garden My Heart: Organic strategies for backyard sustainability "I have directed or redirected this sprawling patch, this tiny fragment of the vast network of living systems on our planet, eaten a little of the bounty and been intimately rejoined to life's miracle and power--all without toxics, without poisoning the plants and the creatures and the air and the soil.

"I have struck a bargain with life and tried to keep my side of the deal, at least here, in my backyard, on a little patch of dirt."

You can strike that bargain too.

---

Customer Rating:
Summary: Good story, real life
Comment: Although I was questioning nearly every food choice while reading this book, it is fascinating! Not everyone will feel this way: a friend said she could not get into it because she doesn't like asparagus, and that is what the book was about (!?). Now that I have had time to fully digest the book (pun intended), I am able to be more mindful of my food choices without being completely overwhelmed. I enjoyed the recipes, and the notes on where to find more information on several of the issues presented. Read this book during the spring and summer -- then you can savor the best while reading up on it!

---

Customer Rating:
Summary: Comforting and Inspiring
Comment: Good arguments and an interesting point of view from someone who knows how to make their own food from the earth, to the kitchen, to the plate.

---