Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

A Year of Food Life

By: Barbara Kingsolver, Camille Kingsolver, Steven L. Hopp

Narrated by: Barbara Kingsolver, Camille Kingsolver, Steven L. Hopp

Length: 14 hrs and 35 mins

Publisher's summary

When Barbara Kingsolver and her family move from suburban Arizona to rural Appalachia, they take on a new challenge: to spend a year on a locally-produced diet, paying close attention to the provenance of all they consume.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle follows the family through the first year of their experiment. They find themselves eager to move away from the typical food scenario of American families: a refrigerator packed with processed, factory-farmed foods transported long distances using nonrenewable fuels. In their search for another way to eat and live, they begin to recover what Kingsolver considers our nation's lost appreciation for farms and the natural processes of food production. Americans spend less of their income on food than has any culture in the history of the world, but they pay dearly in other ways: losing the flavors, diversity, and creative food cultures of earlier times. The environmental costs are also high, and the nutritional sacrifice is undeniable: on our modern industrial food supply, Americans are now raising the first generation of children to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents.

Part memoir and part journalistic investigation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle makes a passionate case for putting the kitchen back at the center of family life and diversified farms at the center of the American diet.

©2007 Barbara Kingsolver (P)2007 HarperCollins Publishers

Critic reviews

"Kingsolver has the ear of a journalist and the accuracy of a naturalist." (Publishers Weekly)

Practical application of farm-to-table principles

I really enjoyed listening to this book. Firstly, because it realistically defines the benefits of farm to table living without sugarcoating the difficulties and sacrifices in making that lifestyle reality. Secondly, because it was well narrated by three members of the same family who have a vested interest in conveying information to the audience.

amazing

this book is inspiring, terrifying, and eye opening. listened to it twice in one week.

An Important Story about Food Choices

What did you love best about Animal, Vegetable, Miracle?

Kingsolver tackles a big issue in a personal perspective with eloquence.

What did you like best about this story?

Food choices impact our health, our community and our world - it can seem like too big of a topic for one person to make a difference. This story brings it to a level where we can understand that small choices can have a big impact.

What does the narrators bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

I enjoy their voices. I think their three voices with three perspectives works well.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

I enjoyed the entire book. It was interesting to hear about their food choices when travelling.

Any additional comments?

I try to get everyone I know to read this book.

Life-changing book, a brilliant recommendation from my chicken raising hairdresser

My hairdresser recommended this book as “life-changing” when I said I was interested in raising chickens, and she offered me an outgrown coop. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the content, prose, and narration and heartily recommend this book.

So inspired

I wish this was required reading. I hope to hear follow ups someday! Thank you.

Book that make you THINK hard about your food

This is an amazing book that really makes you think about your food choices. The narration by the authors really added to the experience of the book. Probably the best nonfiction book I’ve read in a long time!

Loved it

Encouraging as I work on my own backyard garden and have been trying to buy more organic and pasture raised foods. I am inspired to go check out our local farmers markets this season.

Informative & hopeful....

Nice summary of the population, climate and food issues we face. Knowledgeable, tactful with well placed facts and humor.....cheers

Bringing Pause to What We Eat

Since reading this book I can't reach for a pepper at the grocery store without wondering where it came from, how many miles it traveled, or how it was grown. In fact, I only buy my produce from my local farmer's market and am learning to eat seasonally. How and what I eat hasn't been the same since finishing this book - Barbara Kingsolver invites an intellectual conversation back into the American diet, after decades of forfeiting our knowledge about what's in our food over to the food processing plants and agricultural system. In our hustling bustling lives of today we must learn to take pause and give more thought to what gets us through day by day - our food. This book is a great way to stimulate how you think about what you eat and your relationship with food. Kingsolver's self narration of her book is charming and one of the best I've heard. If you enjoyed Michael Pollen's "The Omnivore's Dilemma" you'll love this book even more.

Listening to this is like getting teeth pulled.

Would you try another book from Barbara Kingsolver and/or the narrators?

No thanks.

If you’ve listened to books by Barbara Kingsolver before, how does this one compare?

N/A

How could the performance have been better?

I'm on chapter 14 and I tried, I really tried to get thru this book. My sister really loves it, and I'm a nonfiction fan, but I can do without the flowering metaphors and the deadpan mom jokes, especially with the agonizingly slow pace that she reads at. Some authors shouldn't read their own books -countless times I've realized that I stopped listening an hour ago because it's way too easy to drown her out with literally any thought. The super random farm sound effects between the chapters are not needed either -they just waste time.

Was Animal, Vegetable, Miracle worth the listening time?

The story itself is really interesting, and I like when her kids read some of the parts, but I just don't think I can take another chapter. All in all I DO want to start focusing on buying and cooking vegetables according to season and reducing my carbon footprint by keeping up my garden. The story is there somewhere buried underneath the fluff, but it's the fluff that eventually did me in and made me give up. If the above performance sounds like something you can stomach, then yes, I'd say it's worth a listen.