ARC from HarperCollins has finally arrived! I saw it in my favourite bookstore on the weekend and it was all I could do to stop myself from buying it!

We've got a ring in the making. Details follow in post #4

stay tuned!

So, notwithstanding I've got some other ring books that arrived before this one showed up, I couldn't help diving in last night. I was all ready to be impressed.

But, I have to admit I was a bit rankled after the first several pages. I found the author's tone a tad (okay more than a tad) preachy, teachy, holier-than-thou and I muttered to myself, "You are preaching to the converted. I am not your third grade American child who doesn't know where carrots come from. I mow my lawn with a reel mower and while I don't grow my own, I do buy local, organic and fair trade and click to feed the hungry." and "It's all very well for you to choose to move from your parched desert home to the acreage you already have in Lush Green Abundance so you *can* grow your own, it's hardly an option for everyone." And "Furthermore, while I appreciate your efforts have been a family affair, I don't know that I care to read the essays of your nineteen year old."

Well, I'm at page 63 and she's winning me over. I've learned things I didn't know and have glimmers of possible action plans of my own. I'll give her some quarter.

Without a doubt this is an important book to read, especially if, as Kingsolver suggests, virtually all of America's 3rd grade children do not know where carrots come from. I hope we are all a little more earth savvy than that.

The book was a pleasure to read, packed full of information and useful stuff. It will probably prove an impetus to each of us to do at least one little thing differently and hopefully more.

For my part, I've changed one flower bed into a tomato patch (hideous to look at with the surrounding chicken wire to keep out the wildlife, but hopefully rewarding before the frost hits) and I've resolved to visit my local farmer's market which in these parts does not open for another month.

I do have to say though that I remain a bit irked by Kingsolver and her family. Does she have to be so perfect? I used to be annoyed by Martha Stewart til I found out some of my baking turned out just as nice if not better than hers and she had the decency to go to jail. Couldn't Kingsolver have had a least one total crop failure, weevils in the corn perhaps?

BookRing details follow in the next post!

Alrighty then, this book's heading out into the world to visit the following folks, who, so far, have not run out and bought it themselves:

hotflash (Arizona) - ship international

bethieb (Kentucky) - ship anywhere

Thursday5 (Ohio) - whereever jessibud says (skipped - T5, let me know if you want back in)

jessibud (Toronto) - w/in N. Amer.

Sherria (Connecticut) - US/international here

martinburo (UK) - international

miketrollstigen - anywhere

TheLetterB - NZ/Aus, international

Annet74 (Neth) - skipped (got own copy!)

Kimmi (Can)

It's home again!


I'll mail it out to hotflash tomorrow. Please everyone:

- make a journal entry when you receive it and when you send it off, so we all know where the book is.

- note that this copy of the book is not the best bound I've ever seen. When I got it, it looked like the first 30 or so pages were in danger of coming loose. They haven't yet. But on its travels who knows? So try to keep it together - a dab of glue stick, an elastic band whatever you can do.

- and if you do try a recipe, change one little thing as a result of reading this book, please let us know in a journal entry.

- Enjoy!


ETA:

Oh, one more thing!
For those of you getting antsy while you're waiting, you might want to visit the Web site:

www.animal,vegetable,miracle.com

ETA:
On its way to hotflash today, June 11, 2007

It's here ! With a lovely postcard of Winnipeg too - thank you !
As I walked to the mailbox tonight, I was trying to decide which book to pick up next. Perfect timing.

These organically grown veggies came from my garden (1976), right here in Tucson .

Kingsolver, as always, forces me to rethink and make lifestyle changes. She’s articulate and very well-informed – a deadly combination – her words translate to mental, billboard-sized flash cards that I just can’t shut out. She interprets complex ideas into understandable, rational, well thought-out arguments in support of her point of view. She is very hard to ignore. What she has to tell us just makes sense. Thankfully, Kingsolver is also able to entertain while informing. This chronology of her family’s one-year experiment in consuming only food from local or organically home-grown sources includes both heartwarming (the marvelous trip to Italy) and hilarious moments (turkey sex !). Hard-core facts, backed up by research, are cleverly interspersed, large footnote style, into the story-telling chapters. All in all, this is an excellent book. (I purchased my own copy yesterday.)

A personal note:
Every word Kingsolver speaks about living in the desert, every water/heat-related reason she gives for leaving Tucson is the absolute truth. Most of us who have lived here a long time (for me, since the early 70s) are worried about the water situation. However, Very few of us have 100+ acres of prime farm land and farm house sitting in wait for us in Kentucky. We’re stuck here.

It is possible to eat from your garden in Tucson. It can be done, but a successful effort is very labor intensive and requires an incredible amount of water – a finite resource in the desert. The nearest thing we have to seasonal fresh produce is a two-hour drive to Benson or Willcox for peaches, pears, apples, some veggies and pumpkins: two gas-guzzling hours. Our best choice is to support the grocers who stock their stores with organic produce, whether it is grown here or in Oregon or California. My grocery shopping this week involved running to three different stores (in 105-degree temps) to find grass-fed beef, organic veggies, and organic yoghurt.

Like Kingsolver, I am also back in the world of carnivores for many of the same reasons she sites in her book. She offers counter-arguments for many of the stats and positions I used to quote and support back when I was boycotting meat. The factory farming issue still stands – evidently with both of us. Unlike Kingsolver, however, if I had to slaughter my food I would be back to eating veggie burgers. Just can’t go there

P.S. I am not ready to give up bananas.

Edited to add that I have, indeed, purchased my own brand-new copy of this book !

Off to the next reader tomorrow.

This book arrived minutes before I left for the farmer's market today. I'm in the middle of another book, but I may just abandon it to dive right into this one. Thanks Pooker for the chance to read this, and thanks to hotflash for the really cool cacti card!

<== Stuff from our garden this year!
I absolutely loved this book! It connected so many dots, answered so many questions, and raised issues which I'd never bothered to even think about. I have to admit that I've always been a picky eater, preferring...I'm sorry to say...McDonald's over a salad from our own garden. But I kept hearing people say, "Fresh tomatoes (or lettuce or any other homegrown thing) are so much better than what you get in the store!" It finally dawned on me that maybe I thought I disliked all these things because I had eaten the crappy ones and formed my opinions from those. So this year when the garden started to produce, I ate some of the lettuce and it actually had a taste and had a texture that was nothing like rubber! I tasted the corn and blueberries from the farmers market and had good results there too. I wasn't ready to say that I'd rather have a cucumber than an order of fries, but I was trying. And then this book showed up and put it all into perspective for me. Now when we make zucchini bread from our own baseball bat-sized squash and sauce from our own mountain of tomatoes (We live in a red state too.), I can understand that we're doing our own little part. I've been online researching local sources for chicken, beef, and dairy products; and I have a feeling that I'll seldom grocery shop again without thinking about this book and wondering what's in season down at the farmers market.

I'll definitely buy my own copy of this book to use as a reference. I can hardly wait for spring even though there are baskets of tomatoes waiting for attention in our kitchen right now. Thanks again Pooker3 for sharing this book! I've sent a message to Thursday5 and will send it along as soon as I have an address.

- The condition of the book hasn't been improved by the handling of the post office. The first 44 pages were loose when it arrived. My husband (and head gardener) tried a little glue on the binding, and I'll secure it with rubber bands before I send it back out.

- 8/6/07 I never heard back from Thursday5 so the book was sent to jessibud today.

I am a bad bookcrosser. After having all summer off work, and trying to put a dent in Mt. TBR and catch up on some reading, not one, not two, but 3 bookring books all arrived in the space of one week. And not the first week of summer vacation, either, oh no.

Anyhow, please don't be annoyed with me for what I'm about to do but with less than 2 weeks left until school begins (and I start to go in to set up my room next week), I have decided to pass this one along. I'm sure it will cross my path again, at some point in the future, but now is not that time. I will contact Thursday5 and mail it off to her, or to Sherria if T5 isn't ready for it, either.

Thanks for allowing me to be part of these great journal notes and I look forward to future ones, as well.

Thursday5 asked to be skipped for a similar reason as mine: back-to-school scrambling right now. I mailed this off to Sherria this afternoon.

Arrived safe and sound from Canada! Thanks for sharing it Pooker3 and thanks to jessibud for sending it on to me. I should be able to start it within a week. Looking forward to it...Kingsolver is one of my favourites. :)

I apologize for having this so long! I finished it a couple of weeks ago, got the next participant's address, and just haven't had time to get to the post office. It's going in the mail today, via 1st Class International post (not sure how quick that is supposed to be, hopefully not the slow boat!)

I enjoyed this book, after I got over Kingsolver talking down to me like some idiot, urban pre-school child. I know where where my food comes from. I grew up with over 2 acres of family garden (that I was required to help weed for a minimum of an hour every day all summer long!). We canned, froze and otherwise preserved the excess bounty to last us through most of the winter. I know where meat comes from too; we bought our beef, pork, lamb and chicken from the neighbors, in addition to what my father brought home from hunting. We bought our milk from the neighbors as well, pasteurized but not homogenized, so that the cream really did rise to the top. Eggs, butter, sour cream...much of our dairy came from neighborhood farms, at least some of the time. We were composting when it wasn't cool. Fish, which we caught ourselves in local lakes, was a mainstay of our diet. So, it really rankled me when Kingsolver suggested that I wouldn't know a beet plant if I stepped on it. I got over it, though, and the real message of the book did hit home.

I don't have a garden any more. My living situation doesn't allow it - I rent and share the yard with another tenant. I grow herbs in pots, but have never had much luck with container gardening in general. Because of that, I've gotten out of the habit of eating fresh, local produce. I do try to buy organic when it's feasible and I don't eat meat so the worries of hormone & antibiotic filled steaks isn't really a concern. This book encouraged me to track down local farmer's markets and do a lot more shopping there. It also made me stop and think about the fuel footprint of what I eat, which I've never really considered before. I feel good about supporting local growers and will do my part to make sure they're still in business next year. The food DOES taste better, which is probably the best reason of all to make the switch.

I also enjoyed many of the recipes and menu plans included in the book. I've bookmarked the AVM website so that I can easily find those recipes and I've already started using some of them. This weekend I bought about 20 lbs of tomatoes at a local farmer's market and used the AVM "Family Secret Tomato Sauce" recipe, with a few tweaks. The picture above is my haul from the farmer's market (minus the tomatoes that were already bubbling in the sauce pot when I took the photo).

I think this is an important book, and the ideas in it are important as well. While I won't be making the drastic changes in my lifestyle that the Kingsolvers did, I certainly will be thinking about the ramifications of my choices a little more.

Thank you Sherria and Pooker3. I'll read this as soon as a finish my current book.

Arrived in the mail today. Thanks Pooker and martinburo!

Eeek - I'm a bit dismayed to realise how long I've had this book, sorry everyone. I read it really soon after it arrived, but then put off making the journal entry til I had time...mistake! And now my thoughts have faded somewhat.

Anyway - I did enjoy it, I find Kingsolver's style very easy and engaging. I did get a little annoyed at a couple of points, but only one of them sticks enough in my memory. The book is a very strong push for local food, on the basis that if it hasn't travelled very far, then it is more sustainable, better for the local economy, etc, and as long as you eat seasonally, that's great. But I cannot shake niggling concerns when I look at applying this locally in NZ.

We are currently undergoing a dairying boom on the Canterbury plains, which are very dry, and therefore unsuitable for dairying. Huge amounts of precious aquifer water go into producing milk & feed, large amounts of power into irrigation, meanwhile the aquifers are becoming polluted, the rivers and streams are full of cowmuck, and the city residents wonder where their future clean water is going to come from when the dairy conglomerates have made their fortunes and moved on. Water is free here, and high dairy prices means many farmers are converting to dairy. Now, I can't always tell where my milk has been produced, so it is difficult to exert any pressure as a dairy product consumer. However I cannot believe that it is better to buy my milk from local producers who are producing an unsuitable product for the area than to buy it from someone in a more suitable part of the country, even if it had to be trucked around the country to enable this. The local food movement seems to ignore this part of the equation.

Oh - that was the other niggle. It is not so much a niggle with Kingsolver as just an annoyance for me. We stayed for a month in Santa Cruz, California a few years ago and loved the farmers market, absolutely loved it. Farmers markets haven't really caught on in Christchurch yet - we have several competing ones, all on Saturday mornings. None of them are close by, and the only one that is any good is quite a long way away (one we turned up last year had one veg stall with a very small selection of produce, and the rest was preprepared jams/dips, non-food items). So is it better to buy my veg from the supermarket that is five minutes down the road, or from the farmers market that is 30 minutes' drive away? I opt for the supermarket at the moment, because it doesn't shut at noon!

OK, enough of that. Pooker, should I ask in the NZ forum if anyone else in NZ wants to read this, or would you rather I just sent it on to the next in the line?

Yay! The book travelled across the Pacific in a very short amount of time. I am currently reading a couple books about Africa for my upcoming trip but I look forward to getting into this one.

Where to next Pooker3? Does it come home to you or do you want me to ray-it-forward?

What a great book! It seems that the books I am enjoying the most these days are non-fiction about life and food and choices we need to start making in the world. I will certainly get this book to add to my PC and to share with friends who are loking for something good to read.

It is a similar book as Fast Food Nation (another book I bought after reading it on a bookring) but is coming at the food problem from the opposite angle. Both books say the same thing but both books go at it from very different perspectives.

Thanks for letting me part of this ring. The book will be heading home this week!

It's home!
Thanks to everyone for all your journal entries. I loved reading them.
Handing book off to be read by the Significant Other who was wondering where it got to. :)

This book's been around the world and back but was starting to gather dust on my bookshelf. Time to set it free. I'll take it to the meeting tonight and if no one there is interested, I'll leave it on the shelf in the loft.

Enjoy!

This book interested me as lately issues of food safety and locally grown foods have been all the talk on the news and around my family's various dinner tables.

Thanks pooker3!

I finally got to this one in my mountain of books to be read. I really enjoyed this and have a lot of food for thought (haha) as winter approaches. I'm a committed gardener but nowhere close to being able to eat local foods through winter. Perhaps a work in progress.

I'll leave this somewhere in my travels today. I've added a bookcrossing label in Portuguese although it will likely be found by tourists from the UK.

Happy reading!