Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

This was the perfect book to read at the beginning of spring.
Barbara Kingsolver's description of the fertility and growth of her (amazingly large) garden made me excited for summer to be here. I was really inspired by Kingsolver's family's efforts to eat locally for a year. For them, it came down to giving up bananas (but not coffee or olive oil), growing a very large garden and using its bounty to store up food for the winter (I love the idea of making, then freezing, pesto at the height of basil season), growing turkeys and chickens and then harvesting and freezing them for later consumption, and buying local produce, milk, and other meats.

The best part of the book, IMO, was her descriptions of the family's efforts to eat locally. I thought the sections of the book which talked about commercial farms, carbon footprints, and other side effects of the way Americans eat were interesting, but not as good. However, her description of the turkey industry (I was amazed to learn that 99% of turkeys never make it past Thanksgiving and that turkeys scarcely ever reproduce on their own. Mostly, the females are artificially inseminated and the eggs incubated. Thus, turkey don't know how to reproduce and take care of eggs.) dovetailed well with her description of her own efforts to help her turkeys have turkey babies. I also really enjoyed reading about her trip to Italy part-way through their year and her insights on the Italian food economy.

I feel inspired to do a few (very small) things after reading her book.

1. Seek out farmer's markets and other sources of local produce this year.

2. Plant a small patch of vegetables in the yard.

3. Find delicious ways to prepare foods that are in season. She has a lot of great looking recipes in the book I'd like to try. And I want to look into a cookbook that is organized by season.