Land & Table Book Club

Books play a key role in helping us envision and take steps towards positive life change. And it’s a journey - no one ever arrives, but we can encourage each other along the way.

The Land & Table book club is a way to engage with the core ideas and topics that are motivating a new generation to create a more resilient food system and vibrant local community life. We’ll be reading books about: eating local, self-reliant living, agrarian culture, growing food, culinary history, community resilience, going back-to-the-land, and more.

This is not a book club that will be technical in nature. And if you don’t have a green thumb, you’ll still feel at home. You don’t have to grow your own food or be a homesteader or farmer to enjoy these books. But…you do have to be curious about reviving your connection with the land, with other people, and with the food you eat. And the reality is: tending to those connections is important for all of us.

We meet on the first Thursday of each month and welcome anyone to our meetings - even if you have not read the book we will be discussing.

Registration is encouraged, but not required.

For more information about Land & Table, please visit their website: https://landandtable.com/.

Or join the discussion on L&T Book Club's Facebook page!

This month we will be discussing Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: a Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver.

(Click title link above to place a copy on hold. Also available as eBook and Audiobook on HOOPLA.)

Summary

Bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver (Demon Copperhead, The Poisonwood Bible, The Bean Trees...) returns with her first nonfiction narrative that will open your eyes in a hundred new ways to an old truth: You are what you eat.

"As the U.S. population made an unprecedented mad dash for the Sun Belt, one carload of us paddled against the tide, heading for the Promised Land where water falls from the sky and green stuff grows all around. We were about to begin the adventure of realigning our lives with our food chain.

"Naturally, our first stop was to buy junk food and fossil fuel. . . ."

Hang on for the ride: With characteristic poetry and pluck, Barbara Kingsolver and her family sweep readers along on their journey away from the industrial-food pipeline to a rural life in which they vow to buy only food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it. Their good-humored search yields surprising discoveries about turkey sex life and overly zealous zucchini plants, en route to a food culture that's better for the neighborhood and also better on the table. Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle makes a passionate case for putting the kitchen back at the center of family life and diversified farms at the center of the American diet.

"This is the story of a year in which we made every attempt to feed ourselves animals and vegetables whose provenance we really knew    . . . and of how our family was changed by our first year of deliberately eating food produced from the same place where we worked, went to school, loved our neighbors, drank the water, and breathed the air."