Ramblings

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver


I first picked this book off the library shelf because I kept seeing it come up in friend's Goodreads lists. To be honest, I didn't even really know what it was about!


Having just read Confessions of an Eco-Shopper, this book about author Barbara Kingsolver and her family making the enormous life-style change and become "locovores" was a great follow-on.


Reading how the family resolved to only eat what they grew in their garden or had been produced within a radius of their home was inspiring. It shows how blindly we shop, even if we consider ourselves ethical shoppers. While the US situation is far and away much different (worse) to Australia, experience in other areas has taught me we run, at most, ten years behind them.


I have embraced some aspects of their ethos, but not all. In our wide, brown land, our northern farmers feed those in the south and vice versa. The transport that carries one to the other does the reverse trip with supplies that just cannot be produced in the opposite climate. So to limit ourselves in a similar way would not only restrict our diets in some key elements, but would also have disastrous economical impact of the farmers who are still, by and large, local family businesses more than huge corporate conglomerates.


That said, I am now committed to supporting local farmers markets and small businesses in a pro-active way and will continue to plant and harvest herbs and some vegetables in our small home garden.


I am only one,

But still I am one.

I cannot do everything,

But still I can do something;

And because I cannot do everything,

I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.


The Book of Good Cheer : A Little Bundle of Cheery Thoughts‎ (1909) by Edwin Osgood Grover


View all my reviews