Like another reviewer says below. This book will change the way you think about food and how you feed your family.

Recommended by Liz Visentin

Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle combines a gripping and often humourous account of her family's year of living on their Virginia farm and eating only local food with serious reflections on conventional eating habits, the endangered status of small farms and the provenance of most North American produce. Month by month, Kingsolver shares her knowledge of which crops to plant when, how to tend to growing vegetable plots and how to manage both abundance and dearth. Her daughter, Camille, contributes thoughtful essays from a teenaged point of view and adds simple recipes that celebrate seasonal produce. Kingsolver's husband, Steven Hopp, brings a series of scholarly snippets to the book, which discuss such heated issues as GMOs, pesticide use and farm labour. The book is warm and witty but also thought provoking as it encourages readers to ask fundamental questions about our approach to food: Where does our food come from? How far has it traveled to reach us? How much energy has it used? Kingsolver makes us aware that, every time we eat, we make choices that effect global economics, the environment and our health.

Trying to be localvores in the temperate zone.

Entertaining and informative

Interesting, entertaining and informative account of living on local or homegrown food. Kingsolver has such a way with words so even mundane events take on new life. On finishing the book I got busy and canned 24 pints of local green beans!

I'm curious, why in the description it mentions "and learning the time-honored rural art of getting rid of zucchini"? What is bad about zucchini? Because it grows like a weed although it's a vegetable?

Barbara, her husband, and two daughters move to Appalachia to buy a farm and grow as much of their food as they can. Her humor makes it more like a good story than a lecture. I could relate to her joy as the first tomatoes and then her dismay at the superabundance of tomatoes.

If you eat food, you must read this book. The Kingsolver family memoir is fun to follow.

Read this, it will change your life.