I've loved several novels and essays by Barbara Kingsolver in the past, but admit that at times she can come across as a bit didactic and self-righteous. So when I found our her most recent book told the story of her family moving to their farm in the Appalacian mountains and trying to eat only locally-produced food for a year, I was wary. I feared there would be too many opportunties for Kingsolver to ignore the fact most people don't have farms in the Appalachian mountains and to extrapolate the circumstances of that area to the rest of the world. But Animal, vegetable, miracle was really enjoyable and informative. Excepting the introduction, I thought Kingsolver did a good job at differentiating between what her family was doing and what other people could do.

I love reading stories about growing food as much as I do about the end product, so reading about the family's garden and animal rearing was cool. Who knew it would be so hard to raise turkeys due to the fact that the genes for sex and nesting on eggs have been bread out of them? willow_47z said that she calls this the sexy vegetable book, and there sure are a lot of very yummy food descriptions. I have already visited my local garden centre for heritage seed potato varieties after drooling over her potato descriptions (I had had vague ideas about trying out potato growing in large containers - apparently it's not too hard - so this is a good excuse to try). And all of this had a fun exotic type of feel to me - defined seasons!* Bottling stuff! Making your ropes of garlic last out the year! Making cheese! It's like Little House in the Prairie but with farmer's markets and the internet.

*I was brought up to eat fruit seasonally (not only did my mother think that it was somehow wrong to have fruits from the other side of the world in the opposite season well before carbon footprints were thought of, she also insists that it's healthier to eat produce that's in season as you get the right vitamins etc for that time of year. I'm not sure if this is actually the case, but hey, I like having some foodstuffs seem more special by only having them sometimes). But I am fuzzy on vegetables. I suspect we have long growing seasons in Queensland - tomatos and herbs (for example) always seemed to be able grow.

Tags: books, kingsolver, non-fiction