It took me awhile to get through this one but it was worth it. Barbara Kingsolver is respected novelist and essayist, but to my knowledge this is her first full-length nonfiction book. She describes her family's first year of moving to a farm in Virginia and trying to grow as much of their own food as possible. They raised their own chickens and turkeys. Anything else that they couldn't grow themselves, they bought from other local farmers.

The idea first seemed extreme even to me, a liberal, healthy, vegetarian chick. But what the Kingsolver family said made a lot of sense. Supporting local agriculture is not only saving the fuel costs of shipping in food from hundreds of miles away, it keeps local farmers employed. It's better for your body to eat what is grown close to where you live and food that is in season. Organic is great, but local may be as important if not more so. "Organic" is turning into a very generic label that doesn't necessarily mean much anymore. And it even made me question my reasons for being vegetarian for all of these years. "Bananas that cost a rain forest, refrigerator-trucked soy milk, and prewashed spinach shipped two thousand miles in plastic containers do not seem cruelty-free." Hmm.

Basically the book forced me to ask myself, "Where is my food coming from? How many fossil fuels were used getting it to me? Is my food really as healthy and natural as I think it is?" It's a lot to think about. And I do wonder how much I can do to change my diet in a big city. There are things I can do though. Shop at the local farmers markets all summer, join a co-op for the whole year, try to buy locally produced foods as much as possible. Even doing this more often than I do now would be a good thing. Being aware of these issues is a good thing.