Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

Kingsolver Releases New Book on Local Food  
Starts Book Tour in Washington, DC 
www.animalvegetablemiracle.com

Author Barbara Kingsolver began a book tour for her latest book Animal,
Vegetable, Miracle in Washington, DC, this week, calling on everyone to
think about the origins of our food while putting politics aside and
bridging the "psychic divide" between urban and rural populations. "Eaters
must understand, how we eat determines how the world is used," she read
aloud from the book, as she stood at the pulpit of the Washington National
Cathedral, where the reading took place May 1. 

With characteristic charm and wit, Kingsolver talked about the experiment
behind her book, which describes a year of her family's "eating
deliberately" -- that is, as much local food as possible, lots of it self-
produced. Kingsolver said her family "looked at each passing week as
something like a menu in a restaurant." Her family sourced all their
produce, meat and dairy from their region in southwestern Virginia,
although
they did purchase things like coffee and spices from a great distance, and
grains such as wheat sometimes came from as far as Pennsylvania. Her
husband
baked their bread, she said. 

Kingsolver's latest isn't just another book about local food. It's a great
way to learn more about the food economy painlessly, since she ingeniously
weaves facts about our food system with vivid tales of everyday life, such
as why she gave her Bourbon Red turkey hen a "mental health day," or how
she
coped with 302 pounds of tomatoes in August. Kingsolver doesn't fail to
leave out a few heart-wrenching episodes either, like when "mountains " of
Virginia organic tomatoes were left to rot outside local supermarkets, as
the stores opted for cheaper California produce instead.
 
Her storytelling talents, well-known from her novels like The Poisonwood
Bible and Prodigal Summer, are well intact in this work of nonfiction. With
this new book, she would like to "invite you to come in and sit down at my
table for a while," she said. When it's finished, she said, "I'll ask you,
'What do you think you should do?'." While she said she prefers not to give
advice outright, Kingsolver did urge folks to contact Congress members
about
food policy.