May 1, 2007 7:30 PM
The Origin of the Groceries
Look in your refrigerator. Is it packed with factory-farmed foods processed with pesticides, pre-packaged and trucked in from around the world? With the many benefits of modern food production come great environmental costs and nutritional sacrifice. Now author and activist Barbara Kingsolver shares with you another way to eat and live.
When Kingsolver and her family moved from suburban Arizona to rural Appalachia, they took on the challenge of spending a year on a locally produced diet. Their new book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life chronicles the family’s experiment.
“Food is not a product but a process,” says Kingsolver, “It is circular. It never exactly begins and it never actually ends. To participate in those interlocking and intersecting circles was a miraculous experiment. It changed us all.
Kingsolver spoke about the growing national movement to buy local, how to put the kitchen back at the center of one’s family life and diversified farms back at the center of the American diet.