Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[yarrow@sfo.com]

Here's a family that sourced a year's food within *10 miles* -- it 
can be done if you pick your location carefully.

In the local paper, the nonfiction bestseller list had 3 books on 
eating locally.

> From: reviews@powells.com
> Subject: Review-a-Day: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
>
> Today's Review From
> Christian Science Monitor
>
> Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
> by Barbara Kingsolver and Camille Kingsolver and Steven L. Hopp
>
> A Year of Eating Locally in 'Animal, Vegetable, Miracle'
>         A review by Marjorie Kehe
>
> If you live in North America and cherish the seemingly innocent
> pleasure of slicing a banana over your cereal in the morning,
> think twice before picking up Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year
> of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver. For afterward that pleasure
> will never be innocent again.
>
> "Each food item in a typical U.S. meal has traveled an average
> of 1,500 miles," writes Steven L. Hopp, Kingsolver's husband,
> in the first of a series of sidebars sprinkled throughout her
> book. "If every U.S. citizen ate just one meal a week (any meal)
> composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce,
> we would reduce our country's oil consumption by over 1.1 million
> barrels of oil every week."
>
> Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is the story of how the Kingsolver-Hopp
> family moved from Tucson, Ariz., to southern Appalachia in a conscious
> attempt to liberate themselves from industrial food. They would
> eat only, they decided, what they grew themselves or what was
> grown by others within 10 miles of their home. They were seeking,
> Kingsolver writes, "an affinity between people and the land that
> feeds them."
>
> This may sound like a pretty crunchy read -- either a frivolous
> ecofantasy or an uncomfortable scold aimed at those of us unable
> or unwilling to raise chickens in our backyards. But rest assured,
> it's neither.
>
> This is largely an informational book, short on plot, and don't
> expect any deep insights into the Kingsolver-Hopp family. Yet
> Kingsolver, author of bestselling novels Bean Trees and Poisonwood
> Bible, adds enough texture and zest to stir wistful yearnings
> in all of us who have "lost the soul of cooking from [our] routines."
> Very sweetly Kingsolver reminds us of "the song of a stir-fry
> sizzle, the small talk of clinking measuring spoons, the yeasty
> scent of rising dough, the painting of flavors onto a pizza before
> it slides into the oven." There is no shortage of that kind of
> soul in the Kingsolver-Hopp home, and readers will enjoy the vicarious
> taste of domesticity that comes with descriptions of crusty homemade
> bread topped with (yes, really) homemade cheese.
>
> Animal, Vegetable, Miracle begins with the family leaving Tucson
> ("a space station where human sustenance is concerned") and follows
> them through their first year of life as "locavores" in their
> new home in Virginia. (Kingsolver's "year" begins, naturally,
> in the spring when the asparagus blooms.)
>
> The book wends its way through the discovery that rhubarb can
> substitute for fruit in the early spring, the purchase of the
> poultry flock to be enthusiastically tended by 9-year-old Lily
> Kingsolver, mulching, cheese-making, tomato-canning, and eventually,
> the day on which the poultry will be "harvested."
>
> This, too, the Kingsolver-Hopps do themselves (at least when it
> comes to their chickens and turkeys -- they buy lamb locally.)
> "You can leave the killing to others and pretend it never happened,"
> says Kingsolver, "or you can look it in the eye and know it."
>
> This coming from the mother of Lily, a girl who has to be told
> not to kiss her hens on the mouth and who assures her mother,
> "If I love my chickens six, I love you seven."
>
> Lily, in fact, emerges as a particularly appealing character,
> a plucky, pragmatic, young entrepreneur who lavishes care on her
> flock even as she keeps her eye fixed firmly on the horse she
> hopes her egg earnings will one day buy her.
>
> Like the carefully prepared meals described throughout, the book
> is a family affair. Husband Steven, a biology professor, provides
> sidebars on world hunger, global food distribution, genetically
> modified food, and pesticides. College-age daughter Camille --
> who is no slouch as a writer, either -- introduces recipes complete
> with a teenager's view of what it's like to have parents who view
> out-of-state fruit as contraband material and who embarrass you
> by making turkey sausage in front of your friends.
>
> But perhaps what's most appealing about this book is the love
> that holds its disparate parts together: love of family, love
> of good food, love of the planet, and the willingness to expend
> extra effort to safeguard these treasures.
>
> If you subtract out the labor involved, the life of a locavore
> is an inexpensive one. Kingsolver estimates that during the year
> chronicled in Animal, Vegetable, Mineral her family ate "organically
> and pretty splendidly we thought" for about 50 cents per person
> per meal.
>
> But of course the cost was never the point. "In April I'm happiest,"
> Kingsolver writes, "with mud on the knees of my jeans, sitting
> down to the year's most intoxicating lunch: a plate of greens
> both crisp and still sun-warmed from the garden, with a handful
> of walnuts and some crumbly goat cheese."
>
> This, Kingsolver tells us, "is the opening act of real live food."
> It's hard not to be impressed.
>
> Marjorie Kehe is the Monitor's book editor.
>
> Read the review online at:
> http://www.powells.com/n/217/csm/review/2007_05_14