I've spent the past month and change reading Barbara Kingsolver's book "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle." I don't usually read non-fiction, but when one of my fellow Metro committee members (who happens to be an organic farmer) shoved it into my hands at a meeting, I figured I should give it a read. As it turns out, the book has taught me quite a bit about the slow food and local food movements, and made me re-evaluate my own purchasing habits.

AVM is one-third story, one-third gardening manual/cookbook, and one-third editorial. The balance it strikes amongst these three is just perfect: Kingsolver editorializes on king corn for several pages and then changes gears by talking about her family's springtime/summer gardening practices. On the whole, the book is an experiment in local food: Kingsolver and her family vowed to spend a year growing their own food and purchasing food from other local growers, to both see if it could be done and demonstrate just how hard it is to be purely local.

When I first started reading the book it was still Winter, and most of our local farmers' markets were closed-up. Instead, I went down to the People's Co-op and sought out whatever local foods I could in an attmept to compile a purely-local shopping list. It's hard! Now, I do my best to balance my shopping at Trader Joe's (which I love) with the co-op, and I further plan to frequent the local farmers' markets that come open in the coming months.

For a woman who was once named one of the "100 people who were destroying America" by conservative hacks, Kingsolver is inspired. She writes with a light touch and uses humor and introspection to bridge the gap between her family and the reader. Most of the people reading AVM can't go as far as she does in local food culture, so she doesn't spend the time beating the "must go local" idea over our heads. Instead, she offers easy ways to go local while continuously rattling off the benefits: for the local economy, for our health, and for a more sustainable culture. Indeed, it should be a challenge to all of us: buy local produce, dairy, grain, alcohol, and whatever else you can as much as you can.

AVM is an easy read, broken up into chapters that follow the seasons and months. Each one gives you something a little different: from the seasonal vegetables that come early, to the turkeys around Thanksgiving. And each is also book-ended with passages from Kingsolver's daughter Camille (who provides further insight and recipes) and her husband Steven Hopp (who offers some scientific editorials and culturally-relevant advice/how-to's). These extra passages really give the book a family feel and nicely break up Kingsolver's down-to-earth prose.

In all, I'd recommend AVM to anyone looking to learn more about local food culture or anyone who enjoys the intersection of gardening and politics (with fun sprinkles of editorializing and humor). Being in Portland, Oregon, there should be a decent number of us out there.