Book Review: "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle"

I promised myself I'd wait until I'd finished reading this book to blab about it on the blog, which took all my will power, then I finished it last week and forgot. The sub-title of the book is "a year of food life", which it really is. A year of food life written by Barbara Kingsolver both an excellent author (of reputed fiction fame, just Google her), and farm-dweller. She and her husband and two daughters move to the farm in Virginia that they've owned for years and rented out, but always planned to leave Arizona and settle there permanently. Then they do, and pledge to live off of what they can grow on their farm or buy locally for a year. They did this around the same time as the 100-mile diet people in Vancouver, but were less militant about the rules. (Here is where I admit I haven't read The 100-Mile Diet, but Barbara Kingsolver makes the comparison herself in her book). The narrative rolls through the seasons from April to April and is interspersed with factual info a la The Omnivore's Dilemma (which I did read and loved although found it a bit dense and longer than it needed to be), and anecdotes, recipes and meal plans. You learn about the younger daughter's egg business and how she decides to also sell the chickens for meat, "but only the mean ones" when she calculates how long it will take her to save for a horse only selling eggs. You learn about turkey sex through the author's project to breed turkeys naturally which astonishingly, is an art almost extinct in the US, and the instincts for it are actually bred out of most turkeys!

Wow that was all one big paragraph. Deep breath. Since the European Earwig's Rampage of Destruction, I have not felt discouraged nor felt my energy for the garden waning, but this book gave me a jolt of inspiration I didn't know I could use. If it's possible to be more into the garden than I was before, well I am. Thanks Barbara Kingsolver. I have forgotten all the quotes I was going to write out in this blog for you, so you'll just have to take my word for it and read this book!