I'm a little wary of the "city girl goes back to the land" type of book; too many of these stories eventually end—post-publication—in heartbreak and financial ruin. But prosesmith Barbara Kingsolver's exodus to the farm to experiment with eating locally in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, captured my imagination. As someone who loves a good meal, I'm weary of the trucked-in fruit that passes for strawberries and cantaloupe in my local supermarket. As a home gardener and suburban dweller, I'm increasingly alarmed at the effects of pesticides on our planet, as well as the ingredients which make up supposedly "natural" foods. And what about the petroleum costs of raspberries in January trucked to my home just outside Chicago?

Kingsolver makes eating locally a year-long personal quest. Her reasons go deeper than just a good dinner. "How we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used," writes Wendell Berry. How and what we eat, Kingsolver believes, also reflects our spiritual values. "Our culture is not unacquainted with the idea of food as a spiritually loaded commodity," she writes. "We're just particular about which spiritual arguments we'll accept as valid for declining certain foods. Generally unacceptable reasons: environmental destruction, energy waste, the poisoning of workers. Acceptable: it's prohibited by a holy text." Good food for thought.

She moves her family of four from Tucson, Arizona, to husband Steven's southern Appalachian farm in Virginia, a location eminently more suitable for raising food: "We wanted to live in a place that could feed us: where rain falls, crops grow, and drinking water bubbles right up out of the ground." There, her family tilled a few acres, bought chickens and turkeys, and made connections with local farmers and suppliers. Much of what they would eat they would raise or grow themselves; other food they'd purchase from county or state-based farmers.

Simple in theory; more complicated in execution. What about coffee? Unless you live in Hawaii, it's going to be an issue. Bananas? Cinnamon? They decided to forgo martyrdom. Each family member chose one locally unavailable luxury item (to be bought through the best channels possible). When Thanksgiving rolled around, they weren't afraid to bend the rules to have out-of-state cranberries with their home-raised turkey.

Although much of the information in the book will be familiar to those who have been keeping abreast of the local foods movement, Kingsolver's day-to-day tales of the great experiment sparkle. Her turkeys need to be encouraged to have sex. Who would have guessed? How can zucchini morph from twig-thin to baseball-size in 24 hours? What do you eat in January, if you are seriously trying to "eat locally"? (More meat and lots of frozen and canned foods; winter squash, chard and kale.) "Our biggest surprise was January; it wasn't all that hard," she writes. For aspiring local foodies, a good practical companion book to Kingsolver's is the Simply in Season cookbook from Herald Press (the good folks who gave us the classic More With Less). Recipes are organized by season, which helps reader focus on what to eat when and how to prepare it.

Michael Pollan primed the readership pump for Kingsolver a year ago with The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, which examined where our food comes from and what it means to eat locally and well. Kingsolver echoes many of Pollan's themes. She acknowledges that the local food movement had gained credibility by the time her book went to print: "We'd expected our hardest task would be to explain in the most basic terms what we were doing, and why on earth we'd bother. Now our local newspaper and national ones frequently had local-food feature stories on the same day."

What's most distinctive about Kingsolver's book is that it is a family effort. Daughter Camille contributes her own college-age perspective and seasonal meal plans and recipes. Kingsolver's husband, Steven, an associate professor of environmental studies at Emory, provides hard facts in his sidebars, including oil use per year per citizen, food production and poverty, and the best way to find local farms that sell direct to consumers. One particularly good essay explains why buying from local U.S. farmers actually benefits rather than hurts farmers in developing countries.

Kingsolver stresses that her book is not a how-to aimed at getting readers growing and producing all their own food. Rather, her desire seems to be to promote greater understanding of our relationship with food, and of our food sources and food choices. That said, many of her experiences are so intriguing—especially cheese-making—you'll want to try them for yourself. Until I read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, I thought of cheese-making as some vaguely mysterious art, best left to dairy farmers in Wisconsin with industrial facilities. But inspired by Kingsolver, and with a few simple items ordered online from "The Cheese Queen" at www.cheesemaking.com, my college-age daughter and I made mozzarella cheese in the kitchen in just a little over 30 minutes. The taste was out of this world. The bonus was the fun we had making it together. Score one for family bonding. We're trying the ricotta next.

Aside from the politics of eating locally, the taste of homemade, locally grown and locally raised foods is one of the most compelling arguments for Kingsolver's experiment. Cost, she insists, is also a reason to grow locally, yet anyone who has read William Alexander's gardening memoir, The $64 Tomato, may argue that monetary savings take a backseat to the more tangible rewards of fresh mozzarella, a juicy muskmelon from a farm a few miles away, or even the gardening experience itself.

Speaking of which: the rural life seems to have blunted some of the hard edges of Kingsolver's writing; she's mellowed. Aside from a few perfunctory sideswipes at the current political landscape, she comes across as contented, relaxed and at peace with her world. Any of us who garden know the feeling well. When you connect with the land, you connect with your soul. Yanking weeds works off a lot of angry energy, provides time for contemplation, and helps us make sense of life in general. And really, how can you put a price tag on that?

Cindy Crosby is the author of three books, including By Willoway Brook: Exploring the Landscape of Prayer (Paraclete), and editor/compiler of the Ancient Christian Devotional (InterVarsity Press).

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