I recently finished reading Barbara Kingsolver’s new book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, a captivating story of her family’s efforts to eat locally for an entire year. From one spring to the next, everything they consumed was either grown in their own modest garden or purchased from farmers’ markets or dairies or butchers in their rural county in southwest Virginia (though they did make a few exceptions for staples like olive oil, spices, and fair trade organic coffee).

This is the kind of book that could get all preachy and high-minded, making the reader feel bad for being such a promiscuous eater, but Kingsolver is too good a writer for that. She simply chronicles her family’s triumphs and failures; their joys and frustrations. As she puts it, this is the story of what they learned, or didn’t; what they ate, or couldn’t; and how the family was changed by one year of deliberately eating food produced in the same place where they worked, loved their neighbors, drank the water, and breathed the air (p. 20). Read more