zinhobeats

“Poisonwood Bible” is one of my favorite books, so I began this book with high expectations. What I found was a series of amusing anecdotes about how Barbara Kingsolver and her family decided to move back to their farm in Appalachia and experiment with growing their own food and/or buying locally. However, she overloads us with facts and figures about how this philosophy is better for us. In fact, the interesting stories about her 50th birthday party and the superstition of never saying thank you for the gift of a plant or it will wither and die, finding ingenious ways to pawn off all the extra zucchini, the 8-year-old boy who makes talking turkey heads and performs other creative antics with bird parts from the gut bucket during a poultry slaughter, turkey sex—her description of an unsuccessful turkey mating is hilarious, etc., are overshadowed by her didactic approach when ‘enlightening’ us. I also found it ironic that she set aside this particular year to eat locally with one of the big reasons being to save on the fuel used to transport non-local food. And yet, not once, but twice, she takes vacations requiring the use of fuel—a road trip all the way north to Quebec, Canada and a 2-week trip to Italy. And, in both cases she transports food with her. Maybe she should have traveled to Botswana—according to Alexander McCall Smith, they eat lots of fresh pumpkin there and I bet she would have found some recipes that didn’t call for a 15 oz. can. Ms. Kingsolver makes many good points in her book about the advantages of eating locally and organically. I agree with her. In fact, I agreed with her before I read the book—I didn’t need all that convincing and I’m not sure it would work to sway ‘non-believers’ to her point-of-view. I would suggest that readers really interested in the subject read “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Pollan in which he discusses the three principal food chains that sustain us today: the industrial, the organic and the hunter-gatherer.

2022-10-21 05:27