She won the Betty Crocker Homemaker of Tomorrow Award in 1972 and studied biology in college and graduate school. Kingsolver, it emerges, is hardly unsuited to her new project, documented in “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle,” an engaging amalgam of memoir, environmental reporting and how-to book. Hopp, a biologist who teaches environmental studies, had been raising fruit and vegetables at Hopp’s farm every summer since they met.

Their intention was to spend a year of their new rural life eating only what they could grow themselves or buy from local suppliers. and of how our family was changed by our first year of deliberately eating food produced from the same place where we worked, went to school, loved our neighbors, drank the water, and breathed the air.A few years ago, the novelist Barbara Kingsolver packed her husband and two daughters into a car and left their home in Tucson for good, resettling on a farm in southern Appalachia.

'This is the story of a year in which we made every attempt to feed ourselves animals and vegetables whose provenance we really knew. Part memoir, 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. Their good-humored search yields surprising discoveries about turkey sex life and overly zealous zucchini plants, en route to a food culture that's better for the neighborhood and also better on the table. Hang on for the ride: With characteristic poetry and pluck, Barbara Kingsolver and her family sweep readers along on their journey away from the industrial-food pipeline to a rural life in which they vow to buy only food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it. 'Naturally, our first stop was to buy junk food and fossil fuel.' We were about to begin the adventure of realigning our lives with our food chain. population made an unprecedented mad dash for the Sun Belt, one carload of us paddled against the tide, heading for the Promised Land where water falls from the sky and green stuff grows all around. Bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver returns with her first nonfiction narrative that will open your eyes in a hundred new ways to an old truth: You are what you eat.

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