Good Resources:
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver
Book Review by Joan Bailey
 his is the story of one family's decision to feed themselves only with the food they can produce and grow on their farm, with few supplements found locally. Ventures to the farmer's market on a snowy spring morning for asparagus, last seasons apples, and some hardy cheese along with following the lives of their chickens and turkeys from arrival in a peeping box to, in some cases, the butchering block out back to the roasting pan, are all part of the experiment. The reasons why locally grown and produced food is good for all of us are woven smartly in a text full of stories of those she meets along the way, recipes for cheese, homemade pizza dough, and resources for more information gathering. Like many books worth reading, it serves as inspiration, resource, and starting point for the reader's own adventures in local food.
Kingsolver and her co-authors - husband Steven and daughter Camille - clarify how buying, eating, and enjoying locally produced food saves farms, keeping viable farmland in production to put food on the neighbor's table. Trading hard-earned money for tomatoes, beans, corn, peaches, or lamb raised within miles of the market table by someone who can tell you how it was grown, share a good recipe, and perhaps offer a good joke, is one of the best ways to preserve open space and the character of rural areas. The hard-earned money traded goes back into the land and the community, and is most likely spent in a way that is agreeable to all. The food doesn't have to be shipped or hauled to far reaches, and the buyer pays a fair price for high quality food.
One by one, Kingsolver addresses concerns the consumer may have - higher prices for locally grown food, the seasonal unavailability of certain products, the lack of time in the modern life, the loss of local farms, the availability of farmers markets, how to find a grower, food quality as it affects our health, farming as it impacts the environment, to name just a few - and offers a number of options that are realistic and compelling reasons to make them part of daily life. Her family found that at the end of their year-long experiment, meals had cost about 50-cents a person, including seeds, feed, and time spent preserving the food - a bargain that seems hard to beat no matter what angle is taken.
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is well worth reading, although one point that strikes nearly any reader is that Kingsolver's life is so structured that it seems like such a venture is more feasible for her than most of us. However, the end result is not an impossibility. High quality, locally grown food is as close as a farmerís market in Chelsea, Adrian, Tecumseh, Manchester, Napoleon, Jackson or Ann Arbor.
The River Raisin Watershed is a fertile area that offers many opportunities for growing, trading or buying local food. Kingsolver gives us the information and inspiration to get started.
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