Book Challenge #2: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, Barbara Kingsolver (Nonfiction)

I really enjoyed this book, and yet I'm not sure how to recommend it.

I think the first thing to say is: the author is a particular kind of liberal (class-conscious, ecology-conscious, tending to skepticism and mistrust of big business, invested in social change). If you are at least moderately sympathetic to this kind of liberalism, the book is probably fine for you -- but if you aren't, the book doesn't spend a lot of time trying to convince you. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is about convincing people who lean liberal to care about agriculture, not convincing people who don't lean liberal to do so. If you don't sympathize with those viewpoints to start with, you'll probably want to throw the book at the wall, and so probably shouldn't bother.

That said. If you are, at least, sympathetic to that strain of liberalism, I'd recommend the book.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is a diary of Kingsolver's family's attempt to eat entirely local food for a year. They have a few starting exemptions: the whole family will continue to use wheat flour, even though wheat doesn't grow in their Virginia home, and each family member has one personal exemption (coffee, spices, and dried fruit are among the exemptions), but apart from those limited exceptions, if they didn't buy it in season (or grow it themselves -- they have a deeply impressive, envy-worthy vegetable garden), they don't eat it.

( As someone who has been eating local produce for the past year, this book was absolutely fascinating to me. )