A Good Book - ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, MINERAL by Barbara Kingsolver

I've been reading a very interesting book titled ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, MIRACLE by Barbara Kingsolver. She's written a number of fiction books, and I recognize the name, but don't know much about her work since I don't read much secular fiction. However, this non-fiction work is quite a book. Its original premise is to journal the progress of her family's decision to eat nothing but local food for one year; however, in the process it also educates the reader about much of our food-buying processes and how the food pipeline has changed so dramatically in our lifetime.

The reader quickly becomes apparent of how much we have lost in the culture of eating and cooking food. Kingsolver laments that loss throughout the book. She says mothers are losing the "eat your vegetables" war because vegetables do not taste good any more--they've been genetically bred, not for taste, but for durability to travel thousands of miles. We want to satisfy our tastes for strawberries, melon, tomatoes, and other fruits and vegetables year round, and it doesn't seem to matter to us that we're getting a poor reproduction of what they should taste like--we want what we want now. (A great encapsulation of society today!) Furthermore, she points out that in today's market, 87 calories of gasolines are required to get one calorie of usable food to our mouths. That's what it takes to satisfy our all-encompassing but insipid tastes.

And she makes painfully aware the family enrichment we've eliminated with our eating decisions. Listen to this quotation from pp. 126-127:

"When my generation of women walked away from the kitchen we were escorted down that path by a profiteering industry that knew a tired, vulnerable marketing target when they saw it. 'Hey, ladies,' it said to us, 'go ahead, get liberated. We'll take care of dinner.' They threw open the door and we walked into a nutritional crisis and genuinely toxic food supply. If you think toxic is an exaggeration, read the package directions for handling raw chicken from a CAFO [confined animal feeding operation]. We came a long way, baby, into bad eating habits and collaterally impaired family dynamics. No matter what we do or believe, food remains at the center of every culture. Ours now runs on empty calories.

"When we traded homemaking for careers, we were implicitly promised economic independence and worldly influence. But a devil of a bargain it has turned out to be in terms of daily life. We gave up the aroma of warm bread rising, the measured pace of nurturing routines, the creative task of molding our families' tastes and zest for life; we received in exchange the minivan and the Lunchable. (Or worse, convenience-mart hot dogs and latchkey kids.) I consider it the great hoodwink of my generation."

Whew! That's powerful stuff, and very convicting. I'm only on page 157 out of 354, so I suspect any readers of this blog might be getting more in the days to come.