Wednesday, May 25, 2011

The Trouble with Reading

Everybody seen this poster?  Books do show us a new world just beyond our walled-in reality.  Sometimes that new world is filled with castles and hot air balloons and frolicking unicorns.

But sometimes the world over the wall is filled with factory farms, genocide, political bullshit, and the "thoughts" of Steven Tyler.  Not everything over the wall is pretty.

After reading Holly's post about the Barbara Kingsolver book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, I checked it out from my library.

Click the book to go to its Amazon page.

It is fantastic.  FANTASTIC.  It's about a family of four who decides to take one year and eat as locally as they can.  Kingsolver makes a compelling case for avoiding food that had to travel hundreds or thousands of miles to reach our plate.  (Did you know that the average distance any food on your plate has traveled is 1,500 miles?  Nor did I.)

I knew about factory farming, and that played a significant role in my decision to go vegetarian.  Kingsolver addresses this, and if my only reasons for abstaining from meat were for reasons based on the environment and the treatment of animals, I might be persuaded to go back to being an omnivore, albeit one who shops for meat differently.  Those aren't the only reasons I have so I don't plan on going back to meat, but I am trying to convince Andrew to buy all the meat he eats from local sources.

It's a great book, and I highly recommend it.  It's a book that has wiggled into my brain, and I'm not yet sure what the ramifications of it will be.  I am just sure there will be some.

Be careful when you look over the wall.  That is exactly how they work.

1 comment:

  1. I'm so glad you're also finding the book interesting!

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