Our rainfall since Thanksgiving had measured less than one inch. The desert that day looked like a nasty case of prickly heat caught in a long, naked wince. We were leaving it now in one of its uglier moments, which made good-bye easier, but also seemed like a cheap shot-like ending a romance right when your partner has really bad bed hair. This was the landscape whose every face we knew: giant saguaro cacti, coyotes, mountains, the wicked sun reflecting off bare gravel. One person's picture postcard is someone else's normal. Our driveway was just the first tributary on a memory river sweeping us out. Now we were moving away forever, taking our nostalgic inventory of the things we would never see again: the bush where the roadrunner built a nest and fed lizards to her weird-looking babies the tree Camille crashed into learning to ride a bike the exact spot where Lily touched a dead snake. It was our family's last day in Arizona, where I'd lived half my life and raised two kids for the whole of theirs. This story about good food begins in a quick-stop convenience market. Lynn Neary speaks with Kingsolver and Hopp about their experiences. Her husband, Steven Hopp, writes about industrial agriculture and ecology, and her daughter, Camille, adds flavorful recipes. Kingsolver's family did more than live the story they also contributed to the book. The clan grows a large garden and spends the summer storing food, jarring tomatoes, braiding garlic and stuffing turkey sausage.Īlong the way, the family discovers the pleasures of eating naturally raised meat.

The family leaves their home in Tucson, Ariz., and heads to Kingsolver's family farm in Virginia to live off the land. In Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, Kingsolver and her family conduct an experiment in what she calls learning to 'eat deliberately.' That means eating only seasonal local foods, or food they've grown themselves. In her newest book, Barbara Kingsolver departs from the route taken in popular works of fiction like The Poisonwood Bible and The Bean Trees, to tell the true story of going back to her roots in Appalachia. They spent a year eating locally and home-grown food. Clockwise from left: Author Barbara Kingsolver with her husband Steven L.

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