Animal, Vegetable, Miracle A Local Food Triumph By story3girl on Jun 26, 2009 - Updated Oct 15, 2011

I like food. I like food and I like memoirs. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle delivers both as well as anything I've ever read. In this book, Barbara Kingsolver tells the story about the year she and her family decided to leave New Mexico and move to rural Virginia to try to grow some of their own food and live entirely off of local food. What begins as a challenge, with the fear of deprivation, ends up being a delight for both Kingsolver and the reader as the food and the community come into full force.

This is a book with a message about sustainability and environmentalism, but it isn't primarily a manifesto or a textbook. First and foremeost, this tells a story, and as readers of Barbara Kingsolver's fiction would expect, tells it really well. There are facts interspersed, with sidebars on important issues, but Animal, Vegetable, Miracle focuses mostly on the people (like Kingsolver's daughter who starts her own egg business or her Amish friends whose "gourmet organic oatmeal" is the same oats they feed their horses) and of course on the food. I never thought a book could make me crave asparagus like this.

I definitely recommend this book to anyone sho loves food, sustainable or otherwise, and to anyone who is looking for an appealing and heartwarming memoir.