Become a Locovore: and other lessons from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

As a follow up to my Greener Way to Read post, I wanted to let you know about a book I downloaded to my Amazon Kindle, and loved so much because it is more than just a book. It is all at once a reference for living, a recipe book, a starting point for those considering living more earth-friendly and a memoir.

This great book I am speaking of is Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (P.S.) by Barbara Kingsolver.

At the crux of this book, renowned Novelist Kingsolver chronicles the year that her family decided to eat 100% locally. They ate only the food they could grow or buy from other local farmers. They did this for a number of reasons: to see if they could do it, to eat healthier food free of preservatives and grown in soil they knew, to try and cut down the amount of fossil fuels burnt in relation to the delivery of their food (the statistics regarding how much fuel can be saved if every american family ate one "locally grown" meal per week is astounding!), and to support the local farmers and growers instead of faceless corporations and Government-sponsored conglomerates.

And added benefit is that the whole experience heightend the family's repsect of nature, they learned how to subsist solely by their own merits, and became closer through the whole year. The youngest daughter even created her own Egg-selling business as a way to handle the extra eggs her faithful hens had laid!

Smattered throughout the book are numerous recipes offering both unique meals and healthy alternatives (that don't taste like you're eating healthy). There is even a whole section on making your own cheeses. Anybody that has ever tasted fresh mozzerella knows that the store bought, dried out, over-packaged mozzerrella just can't hold a candle to the fresh, homeade heaven called Mozzerella. And it is not nearly as hard to do as one might think.

I read the book this past summer, barely in time to get a few seeds growing, so inspired was I.

What I can tell you is that I managed to grow a few baby eggplants. I say baby, becasue they were nowhere near the size of the monsters you can pick up at any grocery store. They were shinier on the outside (what you are supposed to go by as the "when to pick" criteria) and the difference in taste was AMAZING. Fresher, more tender, tastier. I picked one, sliced it into circles, batter dipped it and fried it. I almost made myself sick, I ate so much of it.

Needless to say, I already have some seeds waiting for spring, and after I finish this post, I can be found sitting on my couch with a Park Seed catalog and my drawing pad (planning my garden, dontcha know!)

Kingsolver is right, store bought veggies can't hold a candle to something grown in the dirt in your own backyard. Sprinkled in this book, though not enough to be overbearing or irritating, are various economic, social and health benefits of putting local foods at the center of your family's table, and Kingsolver's husband is a wealth of relevant information as well.

Parts of it read like a how-to guide: Choosing and raising livestock, gardening and harvesting, supporting local farmer's markets, turkey sex, heirloom and endangered livestock breeds, and planning for the winter season ahead of time. You name it, and Kingsolver probably has something to say about it in this book.

Anyone interested in doing things a little better for yourself or your family should find this an interesting read, and one you're sure to keep around to refer to occasionally. And I really haven't given this book justice for the space I have.


For more information:

A Greener way to Read

I'm a self-proclaimed bibliophile. Of course, I don't have to proclaim it, one just need to see my house-- baskets, bookshelves and cardboard boxes full of box nestled in various corners of my humble abode speak volumes on my Literal addiction all on their own. And like any addiction, loving to read does have it's down falls.

I've at least got a forests-worth of trees laying dead about my house, and that doesn't count the hundreds of books I've donated to a library over my lifetime. While I love the smell of a book, and the whisper it makes upon opening, all those dead trees sure do collect a lot of dust. And lets not forget the costs associated with a heft book habit. Driving to browse the bookstore is a chore, as the nearest Barnes and Noble is an hour away = gas money and time. Impatient as I am, I often feel guilty about paying the price of a new hardback, but I also don't want to have to wait for the paperback edition to be released. So I often spend the money, only to read the book in one night, and have the Twenty-dollar dead tree hanging around my life looking like a very expensive dust collector. Or worse yet, I buy the book and don't like it enough to even finish it.

And then I had an "Ah-hah" moment. Angels sang, dim became bright and I started thinking GREENER. and that led me to something I truly love, and is also good for the environment. I'm talking an e-reader device. Now before you roll your eyes, let me qualify that this one is good. So good that I have complete strangers stopping to ask what it is that I'm reading.

"It's the Amazon Kindle," I say.
"Is there a book on there?" they say.

And then I tell them why I got the device:

1. No more dead trees on my behalf.
2. No more expensive dust collectors taking up space in my house.
3. No more driving to the store wasting time and gas.
4. No more expensive book purchases.

And then I tell them why I love it:

1. The Kindle device has its own wireless connection-- free and provided by Amazons Whispernet. I can browse Amazon from virtually anywhere, anytime, for subjects, titles, authors-- you name it.

2. I can get a preview of a book delivered straight to my Kindle with virtually no wait-- letting me read a full chapter or two to see if I want to buy the book for and average cost of $9.99 (less than half the price of a hardback book these days!) This is cool if you have a broad interest in subject matter because you can read good chunks of books without having to buy something. I could see how this might be useful for students researching for school.

3. I can organize my books, and keep a HUGE amount of media on my Kindle. I have yet to reach capacity. Even then, if I feel like cleaning it out, I can use the content manager to remove it from my Kindle, and it will be stored on my Amazon Kindle account for as long as I want it there.

4. I can get blog feed, e-newsletters and major periodicals delivered right to my Kindle for very low subscription fees.

5. I can type and edit my own documents sending them back and forth to my kindle account on Amazon.

6. I don't have to plan a trip to the bookstore, or wait for a book to arrive by mail. If I get in the mood to read, I browse, choose and within a few minutes I'm nose-deep in my favorite form of escapism.

Needless to say, I wasn't surprised in the least when Oprah recently was quoted as saying how much she loved the Kindle device. But I had to smile, because I loved it first :-)