Munchy Monday

Please join me on Mondays for discussions on/about food.

The satire is not lost on me that as I pen about food and food issues I have splashes of salmon juice from my baked fish lunch spotting the front of my M&M Meat Shops work shirt...

Ever heard of Barbara Kingsolver?  Or her husband Steven L. Hopp or her daughter Camille Kingsolver?  Have you noticed the asian tweedish green cover of her book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life poised on some bookshelf somewhere?  (You can even take an online tour of her farm at http://www.animalvegetablemiracle.com/)

An interesting read...eye-opening...

For instance, did you know that "The average food item on a U.S. grocery shelf has traveled farther than most families go on their annual vacations" (p.4)  & that "each food item in a typical US meal has traveled an average of 1500 miles" (p.5)

Kinda scary, hey?

Here's a review...

From www.kobobooks.com

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.

"As the U.S. 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. We were about to begin the adventure of realigning our lives with our food chain.

"Naturally, our first stop was to buy junk food and fossil fuel. . . ."

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. 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. 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.

"This is the story of a year in which we made every attempt to feed ourselves animals and vegetables whose provenance we really knew . . . 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."