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Book: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
Quotes of Book: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A
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  1. Barbara Kingsolver _ Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A

    A quality diet is not an elitist option for the do-it-yourselfer. Globally speaking, people consume more soft drinks and packaged foods as they grow more affluent; home-cooked meals of fresh ingredients are the mainstay of rural, less affluent people. This link between economic success and nutritional failure has become so widespread, it has a name: the nutrition transition.
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  2. Barbara Kingsolver _ Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A

    Corporate growers, if their only motive is profit, will find ways to follow the letter of organic regulations while violating their spirit.
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  3. Barbara Kingsolver _ Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A

    We only knew, somewhat abstractly, we were going to spend a year integrating our food choices with our family values, which include both "love your neighbor" and "try not to wreck every blooming thing on the planet while you're here.
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  4. Barbara Kingsolver _ Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A

    Our culture is not unacquainted with the idea of food as a spiritually loaded commodity. We're just particular about which spiritual arguments we'll accept as valid for declining certain foods. Generally unacceptable reasons: environmental destruction, energy waste, the poisoning of workers. Acceptable: it's prohibited by a holy text.
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  5. Barbara Kingsolver _ Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A

    I am not sure how so many Americans came to believe only our wealthy are capable of honoring a food aesthetic.
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  6. Barbara Kingsolver _ Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A

    But approaching mealtimes as a creative opportunity, rather than a chore, is an option.
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  7. Barbara Kingsolver _ Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A

    The only useful generalization I'd hazard about rural politics is that they tend to break on the line of "insider" vs. "outsider." When my country neighbors sit down with a new social group, the first question they ask one another is not "What do you do?" but rather, "Who are your people?
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  8. Barbara Kingsolver _ Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A

    Eaters must understand," Wendell Berry writes, "that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act, and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used.
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  9. Barbara Kingsolver _ Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A

    Our holiday food splurge was a small crate of tangerines, which we found ridiculously thrilling after an eight-month abstinence from citrus.... Lily hugged each one to her chest before undressing it as gently as a doll. Watching her do that as she sat cross-legged on the floor one morning in pink pajamas, with bliss lighting her cheeks, I thought: Lucky is the world, to receive this grateful child. Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing.
    book-quotegratitude

  10. Barbara Kingsolver _ Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A

    the conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners
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  11. Barbara Kingsolver _ Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A

    Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing.
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  12. Barbara Kingsolver _ Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A

    Cooking without remuneration" and "slaving over a hot stove" are activities separated mostly by a frame of mind. The distinction is crucial. Career women in many countries still routinely apply passion to their cooking, heading straight from work to the market to search out the freshest ingredients, feeding their loved ones with aplomb. {...} Full-time homemaking may not be an option for those of us delivered without trust funds into the modern era. But approaching mealtimes as a creative opportunity, rather than a chore, is an option. Required participation from spouse and kids is an element of the equation. An obsession with spotless collars, ironing, and kitchen floors you can eat off of---not so much. We've earned the right to forget about stupefying household busywork. But kitchens where food is cooked and eaten, those were really a good idea. We threw that baby out with the bathwater. It may be advisable to grab her by her slippery foot and haul her back in here before it's too late.
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