Book Review and off on a tangent

I am always amazed that not everybody reads as a form of entertainment. Books are where I get much of my inspiration. They open my eyes to different cultures, history, unheard of philosophies on life, adventures and new ideas.

My latest read, Animal,Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver
http://www.animalvegetablemiracle.com/ is her most recent book. She is one of my favorite contemporary authors. She is a novelist and I believe this is her first foray into non-fiction.

In a nut shell this book documents a year in her family's life as they leave behind the industrial food supply in search of a better, healthier way to eat. She and her family move to their farm in Virginia to grow, raise and purchase locally (within a 100 miles or so) all the food they will eat for an entire year. Along the way she exposes for her readers the real health, environmental and economic hazards that are inherent in our current industrial food system.

I thought it would be a dry read, but oh was I wrong. Chapter after chapter I laughed out loud. Her experience is especially relevant to any one who has ever lived rural, grown a garden or given serious thought as to how to feed him/herself or family in a healthier manner than is standard in America.

She had chosen to try on a lifestyle that for our great grandparents would have been routine. Nowadays it is a unique enough lifestyle to warrant a book. In many ways it was the lifestyle of my best childhood friend's family. We lived in a small, rural town in northeastern Ohio and her family lived a mile up the road from mine. Theirs was a lifestyle of necessity whereas Barbara Kingsolver's was an experiment, of sorts.

Of course I did not know it at the time but my friend's family did not have a lot of money. What I did know was that I wanted to spend every waking moment at her house with her family. Even back then her mom, Mrs.Began, was somewhat of an anomaly in her generation....remember, this was the 1970s and frozen dinners were all the rage, having evolved from glorified cardboard to barely palatable... She had THE HUGEST GARDEN and would can, pickle, and preserve the excess. She sewed her children's clothes, baked and cooked from scratch and made homemade hard candy for Christmas gifts. As a child, I considered that the stars were perfectly aligned in my favor if I had the good, great fortune to be invited to dinner for homemade perogies. I did not take this invitation lightly either. I knew that if perogies were on the menu then all female members of the family had spent the entire day preparing; it was an event!

I harbor secret dreams of striking it rich someday and buying the Began homestead, if they ever sell it. ( I say "strike it rich" because real estate prices have gone up a tad since my days in Chardon, Ohio. This backwaters, rural town was "discovered" well over a decade ago by masses of Cleveland suburbanites looking to get away from it all. In the intervening years they have managed to turn it into the same insipid community as those from which they fled, replete with big box stores and banal franchises du jour.) The house is the perfect size for a family of four, although modest by today's super size 'em standards, and has enough land for kids to run wild and explore. And for me it is chalked full of great, childhood memories. (Unfortunately it is located in Ohio and although this area is blessed with copious amounts of snow there is not a mountain in sight on which to take advantage of this bounty.) Funny enough, while both our families were experiencing their respective disfunctionality during these years, this house was a haven for me.

Hmm...but I digress. Back to the book and its reverberations. It has been years and years since processed foods have been a staple in my household. Due, in no small part, to seeing the ease with which a particular friend conjures up memorable meal after memorable meal in no time with modest, fresh ingredients. (Don't get me wrong. If she wants to contrive five-star, haute cuisine for a dinner party she is quite capable, given an extra hour or so. ) So Barbara Kingsolver is singing to the choir in much of her book. But I am also enlightened and inspired in such a manner that it is time for me to up the ante on living consciously.