Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Another great birthday read from my in-laws, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life chronicles a family's year of eating local food. Less than twenty pages into it, I scrounged up a notebook and pen and started copying passages. Luckily for you, I'm not going to reproduce all four plus pages.

But I will leave you with a few.

Food is the rare moral arena in which the ethical choice is generally the one more likely to make you groan with pleasure. page 22

History has regularly proven it drastically unwise for a population to depend on just a few varieties for the majority of its sustenance. The Irish once depended on a single potato, until the potato famine rewrote history and truncated many family trees. We now depend similarly on a few corn and soybean strains for the majority of calories (both animal and vegetable) eaten by U.S. citizens. Our addiction to just two crops has made us the fattest people who've ever lived, dining just a few pathogens away from famine. page 54

Concentrating on local foods means thinking of fruit invariably as the product of an orchard, and a winter squash as the fruit of an early-winter farm. It's a strategy that will keep grocery money in the neighborhood, where it gets recycled into your own school system and local businesses. The green spaces surrounding your town stay green, and farmers who live nearby get to grow more food next year, for you. But before any of that, it's a win-win strategy for anyone with taste buds. page 69

Most of us agree to put away our sandals and bikinis when the leaves start to turn, even if they're our favorite clothes. We can learn to apply similar practicality to our foods. page 311 Camille Kingsolver