Have you ever been given a book with the full intention of reading it, but life happens and suddenly it’s 4 years later and it’s never been opened?
Unfortunately, this seems to happen often in these early years of motherhood so far. A big blessing I’ve found is utilizing Amazon’s Audible app to keep up on my book list. While I do still cherish having a hardcopy in my hands, the freedom I have while listening to audiobooks has been fabulous!
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In the case of “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” by Barbara Kingsolver, I already had a copy of the book. You can also try a free trial with Amazon Kindle if you’re someone who doesn’t keep hard copies of books around. Downloading the audible book has simply allowed me to keep up with the book club I’ve recently joined with like-minded people: food advocates, crazy permaculture gardeners, and mindful soil lovers.
“The difference is an objective phenomenon of soil science; what we call “soil” is a community of living, mostly microscopic organisms in a nutrient matrix. Organic farming, by definition, enhances the soil’s living and nonliving components. Modern conventional farming is an efficient reduction of that process that adds back just a few crucial nutrients of the many that are removed each year when biomass is harvested. At first, it works well. Over time, it’s like trying to raise all children on a bread, peanut butter, and the same bedtime story every night for ten years. (If they cry, give them more bread, more peanut butter, and the same story twice.) An observer from another planet might think all the bases were covered, but a parent would know skipping the subtleties adds up to slow starvation. In the same way, countless micronutrients are essential to plants. Chemicals that sterilize the soil destroy organisms that fight plant diseases, aerate, and manufacture fertility. Recent research has discovered that just adding phosphorus (the P in all “NPK” fertilizers) kills the tiny filaments of fungi that help plants absorb nutrients. The losses become most apparent in times of stress and drought.”
Barbara Kingsolver “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle”
Kingsolver’s writing is inspiring, poetic, and eye opening to the living world around us. She creates this realistic and beautiful picture of the successes and hardships her family went through while focusing on growing their own food or shopping locally for a full year.
“If every US 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 every week.”
Barbara Kingsolver “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle”
It’s packed full of comedic relief, hard truths, and inspiration on how to make small (or big) changes in your own life to be more involved in where your food comes from. The affects of big farming and big business are wreaking havoc on the environment and to our health – whether we want to admit it or not.
This books is a great introduction into our current food production system and the beauty of growing your own food paired with shopping locally. Shopping from local grocers or directly from farmers is something that I definitely want to be enforcing more strictly into our family’s food supply.
My current biggest struggle is making sure I’m shopping in season. I know all the reasons and benefits of doing so, but need to really dive in and stop making excuses.
A must read, in my humble opinion! I would love to hear your thoughts and opinions of this book when you read it or if you already have!