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Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (P.S.)

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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.

Interesting but Flawed -
Interesting book. It inspired me to spend more time working on my own (small) garden. I learned new things about lactose intolerance and cheese making, and I'll probably try my hand at making cheese sometime soon. I also learned a bit about slaughtering fowl, which I haven't had the opportunity to do.

However, I found the main premises of the book annoying. The author wants all our food to be generated locally, by independent small farms. She opposes the long distance transportation of food, primarily due to the general wastefulness and energy/pollution expense of the process. She opposes corporate farms because they are involved in questionable GMO practices, pollute, and are leading toward reduction of species diversification.

All of these points are valid, and there are certainly reasons to be concerned. However, her insistence on a return to an agrarian society is retrograde at best. This is not the direction humanity is taking, nor should it. The way forward certainly involves GMO, and we need to be thinking about how to use it to our advantage, not fighting a pointless battle against it.

The ubiquitous and cheap availability of exotic foods from other climates is a wonder of modern society, not something to be dismissed out of hand as the author does. The ability to get fresh bananas and berries at any time of the year, anywhere in the developed world is an example of positive progress, not a social disease.

The author correctly identifies several negative side effects of our current situation, but addresses them in the wrong way. Rather than preserving the positive advances and isolating the specific causes of side effects, she seems to prefer that we roll the whole system back to a previous, simpler, agrarian time. This proposal is absurd, of course, but she constantly hammers it down on you throughout the entire book.

Rather than thinking about our systems in reactionary, retrograde terms, we need to be looking to the future and thinking about how we can optimize our advancement.

A guide to change your eating -
Barbara Kingsolver uses her very readable style to encourage us all on a journey to understand the effects of the standard American diet on our own health as well as the health of the earth. This book is a fun and heart-touching read that also contains great recipes and short insightful inserts regarding the negative impacts of the US agricultural and food production system. The authors provide hope that personal choice in selecting locally grown and natural whole foods can positively impact our future. It helped me make the move to a more healthy lifestyle. This book will also make a great gift for family and friends.

Great theme, Interesting Topics are sometimes lost in the Preaching -
As some of the reviewers write, I, too, believe that the premise of this book is a good one - eat local - however, there has to be a better way to present this book than through a preachy tone. I kept reading, but also kept putting the book down, which is unusual for me.

Our family tested our gardening skills this year and have grander plans for next year, albeit nothing like Ms. Kingsolver's foray. I kept reading this book because Ms. Kingsolver would throw in some really good information on certain topics (it would have been nice if she had created a plant chart as an appendix). The recipes were interesting to look at, but I'll probably only try one or two of them because it looks like I like a much spicier dish than Ms. Kingsolver's family (or maybe the spices were allowed because they weren't locally grown?). Apparently they are available on the book website, so you don't need to buy the book if you want to see the recipes.

Cheese-making is something I'd like to explore thanks to reading this book. I might try adding to my bread ingredients too, thanks to Ms. Kingsolver's husband.

So, all in all, I thought the book was interesting because I already was in the position to want to try some of the things that Ms. Kingsolver's family did. However, Ms. Kingsolver's presentation comes out very preachy, so those who just want to read the book for entertainment may find it too tedious.

Too much preaching -
How to rate this book was difficult as there were portions that I enjoyed. But by the time the friend came to visit from Arizona and I heard again about the waste of gas to bring food I felt I had been preached to too much. A shortened version of this book would be better.

Local is better -
This book is very inspiring for those who are unaware or unclear about how much buying produce from far away affects our environment, our farmers and biodiversity. I loved it, and starting following the principles - they make sense.