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Summary and Reviews of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

A Year of Food Life

by Barbara Kingsolver
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus (9):
  • Readers' Rating (4):
  • First Published:
  • May 1, 2007, 384 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Apr 2008, 400 pages
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About This Book

Book Summary

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."

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Reviews

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Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is to food as Bill Bryson's books are to travel - accessible and likely to appeal to a far wider audience than most of their genre. The one or two reviewers who criticize the book on the basis that supermarket organic foods cost too much for real people on real budgets seem to be missing the point. Not once in the year do the Kingsolver family buy a bijou package of overpriced organic vegetables from a supermarket. Instead they eschew the supermarket in favor of seeking out locally grown foods, usually grown by themselves or bought from local farmers markets - and save money in the process...continued

Full Review (1052 words)

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Beyond the Book



Did you know? The US food supply chain factoids.

  • The average supermarket food item has traveled 1500 miles to reach our kitchens - that's further than most families go on vacation.
  • If every US citizen ate just one meal a week from locally grown meat and roduce we would save 1.1 million barrels of oil every week!
  • Six companies now control 98 percent of the world's seed sales; the largest of these is Monsanto. The most common seed modifications are genes that kill caterpillars and make the plant resistant to a specific herbicide; for example, Monsanto create plants that are resistant to Roundup, which they also own.
  • Since the beginning of time, farmers have saved seeds from one crop in order to plant the following year. ...

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Read-Alikes

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