ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, MIRACLE
By Barbara Kingsolver
HarperCollins, 2007
Category: Non-fiction for Grown-ups
“Eaters must understand, how we eat determines how the world is used.”
I’ve been thinking for days what I could possibly say about this book, and I keep coming back to this single word:
Life-altering.
Confronting our food life—and by our food life I mean the food life of my own little family—is something I struggle with. Like so many others, I want to make choices that will keep us and our planet healthy. This isn’t easy. It is the opposite of easy, actually. But Barbara Kingsolver and her family reminded me why it is imperative to keep trying. For one year, they ate nothing but food produced in their own neighborhood; if they couldn’t grow it or find it locally, they lived without it. This book is a memoir of that experience.
“It’s the worst of bad manners—and self-protection, I think, in a nervously cynical society—to ridicule the small gesture. These earnest efforts might just get us past the train-wreck of the daily news, or the anguish of standing behind a child, looking with her at the road ahead, searching out redemption where we can find it: recycling or carpooling or growing a garden or saving a species or something. Small, stepwise changes in personal habits aren’t trivial. Ultimately they will, or won’t, add up to having been the thing that mattered.”
Buoyed by this book, I’ll keep making small, stepwise changes … and believing with all of my heart that they matter.