I hadn’t read any of Barbara Kingsolver’s work before I picked up this book – but I knew her reputation as an award-winning fiction author. For me, the premise that a family could live as ‘locavores’ for a year, in an extended test of self-sufficiency and conscious living and eating, made this book particularly interesting.
Kingsolver and her co-authors (her husband and children, now adults) moved from the arid west of the States to the lush and changeable east, to their family farm in the Appalachians. The family’s stories of how they set about providing their own food, harvested from the plants and animals that they raised, are intermingled with documentary-level reporting on the state of the food industry in the US, and ultimately elsewhere. Kingsolver discusses how corn syrup is an added ingredient (and added calories) in too many foods, or how domesticated turkeys have forgotten how to breed naturally.
It’s a decade since the book was first published and it’s still as fresh and relevant as it was then, and probably more so. It contains added material by the now-adult Kingsolver children. It’s time for me to read it again, with my glasses on, as the type seems terribly small …
“Our highest shopping goal was to get our food from so close to home, we’d know the person who grew it. Often that turned out to be ourselves as we learned to produce what we needed, starting with dirt, seeds, and enough knowledge to muddle through. Or starting with baby animals, and enough sense to refrain from naming them.” Barbara Kingsolver.
