Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Last night, a friend and I went to listen to Barbara Kingsolver read from her new non-fiction book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. Kingsolver, her husband, and two daughters moved from the Arizona home to an Appalachian farm and began with an experiment: to eat natural, organic foods grown locally. They committed to a year of purposeful eating, of ensuring that each morsel of food was harvested from their own garden or from their heirloom chickens and turkeys, or purchased at their local farmer’s market.

Kingsolver gave a relaxed reading. She read passages from her book interspersed with a slide show of farm, food, and family photographs taken by her husband. She even read a curious and funny passage about turkey sex, and surprised the audience with video footage of the act in question! (Did you know that commercial turkeys no longer are capable of sex? Their instinct for sexual reproduction has been bred out of them so that breeding turkeys must be artificially inseminated).

And this book is a family affair, with recipes and essays from her older daughter Camille and notes and stories by her husband Stephen. I haven’t been able to dig into the pages yet, but I am looking forward to immersing myself in the soil, work, and harvest of another Kingsolver book.

By the way, Kingsolver donated all of the ticket proceeds to PCC’s Farmland Trust. Here’s more info on the organization: http://www.pccnaturalmarkets.com/farmtrust/.