Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

by Barbara Kingsolver

How local is local? Our friend Gary Nabhan, in his book Coming Home to Eat, defined it as a 250-mile-radius circle for the less-productive desert Southwest. By contrast, the Bay Area group Locavores (www.locavores.com) recommends a 100-mile-radius circle for the more fertile California valleys.

door, but our dairy products come from about 120 miles away. That’s better, we think, than 1,200, which is also an option in our store.

By pushing the market with our buying habits, we continually shape our buying choices, and the nature of farming.

The foodways we explored in this book have become routine to us now, we don’t dwell on the story of this leg of lamb, the broccoli, the garlic, the apples, the tomatoes, and the green beans. Our farm gives these foods up with abandon, fills our summers and our freezers with them. We spent a year consciously learning a habit of eating what we produced ourselves or found at the farmers’ market, and it was long enough for a habit to grow into a preference.

Now that this book is history for our family—and

And any livestock farmer will tell you that’s a regular April morning: save a couple of lives and then go in the house, wash up, and make your oatmeal.

For us, the pleasure of these tours was not talking but listening. We encountered an amazing number of people who wanted to talk about food, think about it in new ways, and renew their own dedication to a long-forgotten relationship between personal hungers and the land around them.

neighborhoods. Researchers who study these trends estimate that locally owned businesses selling imported goods, such as a small bookstore or a florist, redirect around 50 percent of their money back into their own community.

locally owned business that sells locally made things, such as a craft shop, can redirect from 75 to 85 percent of its money back into the community.

Corporate and big-box stores are nearly the reverse: such businesses drain up to 85 percent of the money sp...

huge trend of ordering online; the only benefit is the small amount designate...

goals beyond just reducing our food miles.

we want to promote farming systems that respect the environment, soil and animals.

production, and other methods that sequester carbon in the soil. Many people are aware that agriculture in general, and animal production in particular, contributes to the climate-warming excess of atmospheric carbon dioxide. What they may not realize is that those blanket statements refer to industrial forms of agriculture: chemical intensive commodity cropping and large-scale feedlot animal production. Sust...

regenerative agriculture, and we support it as...

forest. To promote these carbon-negative systems, we never serve feedlot meats, only pasture-based.

In fact, these agroecological practices are so effective in sequestering carbon that they were proposed as one of the climate solutions—known as the 4 per 1,000 Initiative—by the French government at the recent United Nations Climate Change conference in Paris, COP21.

Our second criterion is that we prefer to source from families rather than companies.

Other cooperative farm endeavors pool land, talent, and equipment, organize urban and community gardens, and otherwise creatively reinvent sustainable food systems appropriate to their own neighborhoods.

Between all these enterprises—the restaurant, general store and farm—we’ve managed to redirect more than two million dollars into our formerly boarded-up village and local community.

We attract nearly 20,000 visitors a year to a little town square where people come for a farm-to-table experience and leave money behind to be spread among chefs, servers, farmers, and artisans.

Corner store initiatives have begun to address the issue of access to healthy food in cities. By stocking fresh, local produce at a reasonable price in high-volume convenience stores, these initiatives bring food choices to urban people (especially kids) who rely on corner stores for most of their meals, for lack of transportation.

The wisest people in my life have always taught me that worry is either a disease or an engine: you can get paralyzed or you can get moving.