Animal, Vegetable, Miracle – A Year of Food Life
by Barbara Kingsolver
Serving local foods is the hottest trend in the restaurant world right now, but can you imagine having every ingredient in every meal you make come from within 100 miles of your home? The Kingsolver family was tired of their suburban life in Santa Fe and how they had lost touch with where their food came from. So they gave it all up, moved to their farm in Virginia, and embarked on a journey of eating local for an entire year.
In today's global world it is not an easy task to find foods raised so close to home. And you can pretty much forget foods raised in more tropical climates such as Bananas, Oranges and many other fruits. It also means eating seasonally – lots of greens in the spring, tons of zucchini and tomatoes in the summer, and apples and root vegetables in the fall. These limitations encourage you to be more creative with what you eat and to plan ahead and 'put food by' so you can eat it in the off-season.
A book with such a lofty goal could easily turn preachy and turn off a reader. But the joy the whole family takes in the endeavor and experiences they share keep the book very interesting. Besides the fact that upfront the family allows themselves each an exception, which they use on items such as spices and coffee (fair-trade of course!) making the goal more realistic.
Even if you don't have a desire to give up your current life and give it a go living off the land, there is a lot to learn from this book. The most obvious are the benefits of eating local sustainably raised foods. Not only do you help the community where you live and work, but you also reduce the energy consumed in growing and transporting your food. In addition to how much better tasting your food will be then the industrial agricultural products you see in the supermarket.
In our grocery stores you can basically get any food item all year round thanks to California and importation from overseas. But near your home each fruit or vegetable tends to have a pretty limited window. However when a food is in season you are rewarded with its abundance. Which means you need to find many different recipes for each and learns ways to store them for the off-season. A great perk of eating seasonally is how excited you are as each season comes up. Whether is asparagus in the early spring or Blackberries in summer, the taste of eating fresh after a long offseason is well worth the wait.
This book will give you a newfound respect for the food you eat and where it comes from. Read it then head out to your garden or your local farmers market and try your own local diet.
Serving local foods is the hottest trend in the restaurant world right now, but can you imagine having every ingredient in every meal you make come from within 100 miles of your home? The Kingsolver family was tired of their suburban life in Santa Fe and how they had lost touch with where their food came from. So they gave it all up, moved to their farm in Virginia, and embarked on a journey of eating local for an entire year.
In today's global world it is not an easy task to find foods raised so close to home. And you can pretty much forget foods raised in more tropical climates such as Bananas, Oranges and many other fruits. It also means eating seasonally – lots of greens in the spring, tons of zucchini and tomatoes in the summer, and apples and root vegetables in the fall. These limitations encourage you to be more creative with what you eat and to plan ahead and 'put food by' so you can eat it in the off-season.
A book with such a lofty goal could easily turn preachy and turn off a reader. But the joy the whole family takes in the endeavor and experiences they share keep the book very interesting. Besides the fact that upfront the family allows themselves each an exception, which they use on items such as spices and coffee (fair-trade of course!) making the goal more realistic.
Even if you don't have a desire to give up your current life and give it a go living off the land, there is a lot to learn from this book. The most obvious are the benefits of eating local sustainably raised foods. Not only do you help the community where you live and work, but you also reduce the energy consumed in growing and transporting your food. In addition to how much better tasting your food will be then the industrial agricultural products you see in the supermarket.
In our grocery stores you can basically get any food item all year round thanks to California and importation from overseas. But near your home each fruit or vegetable tends to have a pretty limited window. However when a food is in season you are rewarded with its abundance. Which means you need to find many different recipes for each and learns ways to store them for the off-season. A great perk of eating seasonally is how excited you are as each season comes up. Whether is asparagus in the early spring or Blackberries in summer, the taste of eating fresh after a long offseason is well worth the wait.
This book will give you a newfound respect for the food you eat and where it comes from. Read it then head out to your garden or your local farmers market and try your own local diet.
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Plenty – One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally
Plenty – One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally
by Alisa Smith & J.B. Mackinnon
Alisa and J.B. were hosting company in their very remote house in Canada when they realized they didn't have enough food to cook a respectable meal for their guests. So they set out onto the land around their house to catch a fish, gather mushrooms and pick fruit from the abandoned orchard. They brought all this back, cooked it up and had the most enjoyable and memorable meal of their lives. Making such an incredible meal from food they had to scrounge up made them start to think about what must be missing from their normal meals to make this one so much better. When they returned to their apartment in the city, they did some more research on food and its sources. They learned about all the problems with most grocery store foods (it is less nutritious, more harmful for the environment and lacks taste) so they decided to embark on a voyage of eating all local foods for the next year.
Since the couple lives most of the year in an apartment, they didn't have the ability to raise much of their own food - they would have to buy it. The book follows their adventures in finding and meeting local farmers and learning what does and does not grow near them (you will be amazed to find out how difficult it was to locate wheat something that shows up in many things we eat). As they do their research they learn about the wonderful benefits that small variations can cause in each food, such as how what flowers bees feast on drastically changes the taste of their honey. Through their research they even decide to give up a long life of being vegetarians after they learn how different sustainable raised animals are treated than their industrially raised counterparts.
Alisa and J.B. were hosting company in their very remote house in Canada when they realized they didn't have enough food to cook a respectable meal for their guests. So they set out onto the land around their house to catch a fish, gather mushrooms and pick fruit from the abandoned orchard. They brought all this back, cooked it up and had the most enjoyable and memorable meal of their lives. Making such an incredible meal from food they had to scrounge up made them start to think about what must be missing from their normal meals to make this one so much better. When they returned to their apartment in the city, they did some more research on food and its sources. They learned about all the problems with most grocery store foods (it is less nutritious, more harmful for the environment and lacks taste) so they decided to embark on a voyage of eating all local foods for the next year.
Since the couple lives most of the year in an apartment, they didn't have the ability to raise much of their own food - they would have to buy it. The book follows their adventures in finding and meeting local farmers and learning what does and does not grow near them (you will be amazed to find out how difficult it was to locate wheat something that shows up in many things we eat). As they do their research they learn about the wonderful benefits that small variations can cause in each food, such as how what flowers bees feast on drastically changes the taste of their honey. Through their research they even decide to give up a long life of being vegetarians after they learn how different sustainable raised animals are treated than their industrially raised counterparts.
In the end, this book is interesting and an enjoyable read. However, I didn't find it as inspirational and interesting as the Kingsolver book that we also reviewed. Even though the concept of buying all food locally (as opposed to actually producing most of your own food) is more feasible for me and most readers, hearing the dynamics of how food is raised really helped the story come home for me. So definitely read this book, but start with Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.
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