Good Reads on Good Eats

If you get some free time at the beach or on the porch this summer, you might want to add these books to your reading list.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver. I loved this book start to finish, and it served as my introduction to why eating locally is important. But it did so in a way that was entertaining and interesting, rather than academic. This acclaimed fiction writer and her family devised a plan to eat locally for a year. They would either grow their food, or buy it from someone nearby who did. The book outlines this extraordinary year, what they planted and what they ate—even in those lean winter months. The book includes recipes from their teen-aged daughter and chronicles the chicken and egg business their third-grade daughter launched.

In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto by Michael Pollan. This one isn’t exactly a light summer read, but it sure is eye-opening about what we eat in this country and how the health problems of many Americans can be traced to the industrialization of food. Pollan discusses the “American paradox,”—the idea that that the more we worry about nutrition, the less healthy we seem to be. After reading this book, I realized how far we have moved away from eating natural food toward eating food that has been manufactured and engineered.

Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating from America’s Farmers’ Markets by Deborah Madison. In this gorgeous cookbook, the author takes us across the country on a journey to numerous farmers’ markets. While not all the recipes will work for us here in Western Wake County because some ingredients featured just aren’t local here, there’s plenty of great inspiration.