May 26, 2009

Another Good Book
I promised another report on a good book I was reading weeks ago, and haven't delivered yet. Here we go.
The book is "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle; a year of food life" by Barbara Kingsolver (and her family). The family decided to try a year of eating only food grown within 100 miles of their home. Having a small farm in Appalachia, they grew a good bit of it themselves. They also relied heavily on local farmers markets, and describe in detail how many of these foods were cultivated using organic principles of agriculture. In the process, they deliver a lot of rather surprising statistical data. It turns out that they spent LESS money eating high quality, organically grown, locally supplied foods than they previously had buying mass marketed corporate supplied products. The available data don't really support the supposition that factory farming and corporate monocultural agriculture are the most efficient ways to produce food from acreage, and the extensive bibliography and appendices support every claim made. On the subject of genetic engineering, Kingsolver points out the corporate motive for portraying it as a tool for increasing food volume and nutrition, then refutes claims that such products as "Golden Rice" will improve nutrition. Although she has primarily made a living as an author of a dozen books (novels, essays, short stories), her university degree is in biology, so she has no trouble with comprehension of scientific journals on nutrition. She also points out that most undernourished people live in countries which export food. It makes no difference what or how much is grown if those who need it have no access to it. Distribution is actually the problem. The undernourished simply don't have some critical factor....skills, or infrastructure, or social standing... that would allow them to provide a service for which the "market" is willing to barter food.
Along with presenting the economic and political realities of our current food delivery system, this book is studded with appealing recipes for eating seasonally without sacrificing quality of life. It's perhaps a little more of a lifestyle manual than a lot of people will be willing to accept, but it's hard to imagine that any reader with an open mind won't come away with value exceeding the effort of reading it. And the effort isn't that great....she's an entertaining writer.
Take a look at it, and pass it around. Ted