Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

I read this as part of my humanities seminar entitled "Evil Bananas". 

While I went into the class thinking that I may already be part of the choir,  I actually learned a fair bit about food systems here in rochester. This book however tended to grind on my nerves, if only for the cliched tone and ditzy voice. Kingsolver did pursue a cool idea though. She decided to try to eat a mostly local diet with her family for a year, and then write about it. This required first that she move from AZ to VA. Then she started a huge garden and even got some turkeys and chickens. 

The idea of eating local seems to provide a pretty tremendous environmental impact reduction, and not only because of transport. When people get food from people they know, there is direct feedback about how it is grown and how the land is used. People are then willing to pay more for a product that does not destroy the land. A close correlate to eating locally is eating seasonally. This requires re-learning many things about food storage, so that peppers from July and August can be safely eaten in February. This is exciting because my experiences of eating this way in Ukraine have left such a powerful impression on my food choices, and I will continue to make small changes toward eating and living in this way.

Even with all of the advantages of eating local, I have been unable to convince my roommate to give up bananas. This despite the monoculture approach, low wage labor, and huge transport costs. I guess in many respects we have become so accustomed to having food from all over the world regardless of the local season.

Beyond having geographic awareness food production, the level of processing is now clearly linked to the health status of everybody. The trend is simple: less processed = more healthy. Interestingly, choosing less processed foods often leads to more local foods.

Finally there was one small section that pretty persuasively argued against the use of GMO rice with vitamin A to solve the world blindness problems. The argument is that these areas need rice that can be re-planted, and not become slaves to a copyrighted genome that could be taken away in the future. It also argues that real solutions would improve the root cause of these nutritional deficiencies, which is poverty. Therefore local agricultural solutions, including the elimination of free trade agreements which saturate markets with super cheap staples, would allow local farmers to become part of the solution. Obviously this problem has many possible solutions, but I have begun to become convinced that simply dumping more free food, supplemented or not, is merely a patch, a lid perhaps, on the coming revolution.