Local farms have meat and eggs year-round. The farmers’ market supplies salad greens when it’s only starting to get warm. Kentucky farmers sell pasture-raised pork, lamb and turkey, and even “Kentucky caviar” from farmed fish. Her activism also started early, when she watched farmers founder as they tried to wean themselves from tobacco. Deeply frugal, she was raised in Kentucky among people who still remembered the hunger of the Depression, and she herself recalls qualifying for food stamps in the odd-jobs days before she hit the best-seller lists. 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. 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.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |