Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

I was inspired and shocked that it took me this long to find this book. Both because I am beginning my own agricultural journey and because Barbara Kingsolver is an all-time favorite, I loved this book’s calendar-following content and the voice it employs. The family’s pact to eat local and seasonal food for a year is portrayed honestly with humor and joy instead of preachiness.

It speaks to the things we dive into full-bore without completely appreciating how much work it entails. With determination and intentionality, they commune with the land and find a community- truly aspirational. 

This book was crucial in my path to veganism.

It is a memoir where Barbara Kingsolver writes humorously about a year of living off the land. She is not a vegetarian but must raise, kill, and butcher animals if she wants to eat meat. The result is, every time she eats meat, she weighs the emotional cost.

This reckoning has been my bible. I ask myself, would I be willing to kill the chick I raised to eat? Inevitably, the answer is “no.” 

The book is not a treaty encouraging people to live off the land, it’s the opposite. It… show more.

As a longtime fan of Barbara Kingsolver, I highly recommend Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which chronicles her family’s experiences during their first year of growing and raising their own food on a family farm in Appalachia.

After living in Tucson, Arizona, for most of her adult life, Kingsolver moves with her husband, Stephen Hopp, and their two daughters to Virginia, in an effort to reduce their own impact on the environment and live more sustainably.

Between accounts of the successes and mishaps in the garden, Kingsolver intersperses thought-provoking essays about climate change and the state of the environment along with ways… show more.