Being able to grow a garden within site of your kitchen window adds even more value to this gardening method. No matter how small your space, you can have a bountiful healthy harvest for you and your family.Box gardens are not only practical but they are also beautiful. But right now I have a big pot of soup simmering on the stove full of veggies from our local community-supported agriculture box, and I feel like we're living just a little bit more.Imagine gathering fresh herbs from your doorstep, picking veggies for dinner from your patio and delectable fruit from your balcony. I still can't keep my beloved husband from buying huge flats of Costco fruit grown halfway around the world, and I'm not giving up Italian truffles or French cheese or wine any time soon. There's a chick-hatching scene that will make you weep. There's a careful explanation of why and under what circumstances raising animals to eat them can be the best use of the planet's resources. There's some sound political analysis of why and how our food chain has become a fossil-fuel eating monster that disserves developing economies around the world while eroding our health here at home. They come up with seasonal menus and recipes and share them with you. They make cheese and cook pumpkins and OD on asparagus. It's a lot of hard work, since they're doing most of the local production themselves. In case you've had your head in the sand or don't live in the Bay Area or somewhere like it, here's the book's basic premise: Novelist Barbara Kingsolver and her professor husband pack up their two daughters and move from the New Mexican desert to a small farm in Virginia, where it rains and things grow, and after a bit of a weaning process that involves hard decisions about bananas, undertake a year of eating nothing but locally produced food. A quick flip through Barbara's chapter on turkey butchering will cure you. If you've read a certain amount of writing on food you know, sweet and delicious though it may be, that it can get cloying.
But mostly because this is beautiful, tightly-strung writing about food and what it means to nourish ourselves.
Not just because its "Year in Provence"-style charm makes Appalachia sound as alluring as the French or Italian countryside (no euros required). Not just because it conveys an important message about the sustainability and environmental impact of our foodways.
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