Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
Tickets $10 @ Pages Books & Magazines (In-person ticket sales only, no reserves or phone orders.)
Are we truly what we eat? Is it possible to disengage from the multinational processed-food pipeline? Acclaimed author Barbara Kingsolver and her family voted ‘yes’ on both counts. They spent a whole year consuming only food that was either produced locally or that they grew themselves. Kingsolver’s chronicle of their collective undertaking, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, was a international bestseller. To celebrate the book's trade paperback edition, Kingsolver will deliver an interactive multimedia presentation about her family's ongoing project. Wayne Roberts of Toronto Food Network will host the evening and moderate a Q&A session between Kingsolver and the audience. — A This Is Not A Reading Series event presented by Pages Books & Magazines, HarperCollins Canada, and EYE WEEKLY.
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life is Barbara Kingsolver’s bestselling memoir of a year of living and eating locally – paying very close attention to the provenance of everything that she and her family consumed. As Kingsolver says, “Our highest shopping goal was to get our food from so close to home, we’d know the person who grew it. Often that turned out to be ourselves as we learned to produce what we needed.” Beyond serving as a chronicle of the first year of the Kingsolver family’s ongoing experiment, Animal, Vegtable, Miracle is a call to arms. Kingsolver eviscerates the state of our food supply – from seeds controlled and patented by multinational corporations to a virtually two-crop system (corn and soybean) that leaves North Americans one pathogen away from massive famine. It’s also a rumination on the pleasures of growing and harvesting your own food. Above all, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is a joy to read.
Barbara Kingsolver’s ten published books include the internationally bestselling novel, The Poisonwood Bible, as well as a collection of short stories, poetry, and personal essays. Her work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. In 2000 she was awarded the National Humanities Medal, America’s highest honor for service through the arts. Kingsolver grew up in Kentucky and earned a graduate degree in biology before becoming a full-time writer. She lives with her husband and two daughters on a farm in southern Appalachia.
Wayne Roberts is Project Coordinator of the Toronto Food Policy Council. A long-time labour activist, Roberts calls food the ultimate tool for social action. "Food can effect change," he says. "It's one way for people to take independent action”. Roberts received a Canadian Environment Award in 2002 for such contributions to the ecological movement as founding the Coalition for a Green Economy. He lives in Toronto.
