Favorite Female writers; food facts

Favorite female writer of the moment - Barbara Kingsolver. Half of the thousand or so audience members at the Emory talk last night wanted their books signed. I used my old urban stride to make it to the front end of that line and got to speak to her. Here is the scary (not to mention fuzzy) picture that Nicolas took of me, with her husband Steve to the right. I look like the crazed fan that I was, and wish that I had taken a better look in the mirror (did I think to look?) before leaving the house. I did make fairly intelligible sounds towards her, including the fact that Nicolas had grown many of the foods in her dinner that night. She and her husband raved about the arugula.

Now that it has earned Barbara Kingsolver praise, I have to highlight it here:So good on a pastrami sandwich (or in a salad for those who are eating only locally and don't have a local pastrami maker :)

Here's one of the farmer who grew it:He's wearing the cool new shirt that we bought last night from GA Organics (one for me too). It says "I'm a Local" on the front with the GA Organics emblem on the back.

I hope that you get to read Animal, Vegetable, Mineral. If you don't (listen it took me months while it was one of seven must-read books by my bed, and I am that scary fan), then know that you can get great recipes at the web site that I linked. Eating locally is not just a dire, get ready for the end of the world as we know it, gloom-filled fate. It is also a way to get back in touch with healthy food that tastes good and to get to know where your food comes from, or have the satisfaction of growing it yourself. Kingsolver's family decided to eat only locally produced food for a year but she said that they didn't even notice at first when the year was up. In that year they made a paradigm shift that had them appreciating this way of life so much that they are still doing it.

We eat a lot locally but have never gone cold turkey on food that is produced more than 100 miles away. We are talking about some day soon taking on that challenge for a month. Speaking of turkey, she told great stories (she's very funny) about their Bourbon Reds - the same breed that Gillen is raising (down to two couples now, but they're fit and sassy and hanging out as boy/girl pairs).

Local eating doesn't have to be such a huge commitment. As her husband says, "if every U.S. citizen ate just one meal a week (any meal) composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce, we would reduce our country's oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels of oil EVERY week." He also pointed out that "because most of our food travels 2,000 miles before it reaches our plates.. [it went up 500 miles this past year when we started importing more food than we export] we're consuming 400 gallons of oil a month per citizen...for agriculture." This includes the production of synthetic fertilizers, tractors, packaging and farming machinery. But most of this oil is used "getting the food to our plates".

I got one more statistic from the book and talk last night that I want to share here. "Modern U.S. consumers now get to taste less than one percent of the vegetable varieties that were grown here a century ago. These old timers now lurk only in backyard gardens and on farms that specialize in direct sales - if they survive at all."

Off my soapbox now.

I realized last night that this was the third favorite woman writer that I was lucky enough to hear speak in the past few years. I also got to see Annie Lamott (so funny that I cried) and another amazing but less well known writer, and just as good - Janisse Ray. These three are great at fiction and at more political, personal journaling about our times. I feel so inspired by all of them.