Animal, Vegetable, Miracle : A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver

My most vivid childhood memories are of my parents’ kitchen, our green laminated kitchen table, a white enamelled bowl, the clunck clunk sound of shelling peas fresh from our garden. My backyard boasted carrots, spinach, strawberries cabbages, passionfruit, chokos, plums, lemons, oranges, nectarines, persimmons, macadamia nuts. Each night my mother pulled from the earth just outside our backdoor at least one produce for our dinner table. I have to admit when I open my freezer door today and take out the plastic packet of frozen peas I really miss my childhood.

It was exactly for this reason I read with great zeal Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, her tribute to the subsistence living and the natural world.

In a complete departure from her usual fiction writing the such as Poisonwood Bible this popular author easily translates her style into an autobiographical account of her year of food life. Barbara, a successful and best selling author, up stakes from her comfortable urban home in Tucson Arizona and spends a year living off her own land and from produce found within a 50 mile radius. In her first non fiction work Kingsolver gives a first hand account of the joys and woes of growing, harvesting and eating your own food.

The idea of reducing your carbon footprint has often intrigued me. I would certainly like to believe that I am an environmentally responsible individual but I have always been a little sceptical about organic labelled products on supermarket shelves. This chronicle of one family’s journey eating locally raised meat, washing earth from zucchinis and breaking newly laid eggs opened my eyes to a dream I could possibly invisage. Growing and eating only seasonal produce seem to be their doctrine and in fact the key to their rational and successful rural lifestyle ,living off the land. If you would like to turn the clock back or even just hope for a better future, read this engaging and thought provoking book.

Penny

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle : A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver