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A Year of Food Life

Barbara Kingsolver, with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver

 

 

What's new since 2007

In the years since we published Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, each of us has retained our personal dedication to eating locally while moving into various other projects in our professional lives.

 BK In Barbara's life ...

One of the things I love about my job as a professional author is the chance to move into whole new disciplines every year or so: new questions, new locales, new kinds of research, new characters. Each of my thirteen published books has been called, by some reviewer somewhere, “a departure.” I guess that makes me a train station. Now that Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is two books ago, my professional life no longer revolves around discussing local food or working as a spokesperson for sustainable agriculture—I leave that in the very capable hands of others, while I look ahead to the next book.

In 2009 I released a new novel, The Lacuna (HarperCollins), that has nothing to do with food except that its protagonist works as a cook in Frida Kahlo’s kitchen. The historical novel begins with the Mexican Revolution and ends in Asheville, North Carolina during the time of the McCarthy witch-hunts. Now I am working on a new novel about something altogether different (naturally). For more information see kingsolver.com.

 

New for Steven   

After the release of AVM we traveled on book promotion tours in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. I was overwhelmed by the explosive growth of interest in local food and local economies, talking with hundreds of people about their stories (see Local Food Adventure Stories on this site), and had the opportunity to visit dozens of wonderful farming projects.

Since AVM the number of registered farmers’ markets has grown by a steady 15% per year. I have remained engaged with this wave of enthusiastic growth in local food economies by continuing this conversation with people across the country, developing a course on sustainable agriculture at Emory & Henry College [click here for more about the department], serving on the board of the regional local-food organization Appalachian Sustainable Development [found here], publishing local-food related scholarly articles, and (of course) continuing to grow a larger and larger garden each season.

My most notable commitment to local food has been to put the ideas I’ve learned into practice in our own little community. In 2008, I created a community business devoted to developing and promoting a local economy. The Meadowview Farmers’ Guild [http://www.meadowviewfarmersguild.com/] is a two-part business, a restaurant devoted to local foods and a general store supplied with local hand-made goods from more than120 different individuals. The Harvest Table Restaurant [http://www.meadowviewfarmersguild.com/HarvestTable.html] is a casual fine dining restaurant devoted to sourcing its food as locally as possible.

This is a dedicated mission, with the restaurant acquiring various foods from over 60 local farmers, growers and producers. In addition to relying on local farmers’ market growers for their foods, The Harvest Table contracts for specific products including pasture-based meats, and maximizes local food use by storing, canning, freezing and dehydrating local foods. The most recent chapter in the Harvest Table story is the formation of its own production arm, The Harvest Table Farm [see here]. This is a long-term project aimed at growing specifically for the needs of the restaurant, and to fill in the local food gaps from other growers. The farm is one of the very few dedicated restaurant-operated farms in the country. The Harvest Table farm is always looking for volunteers, either on a short-term visitation basis, or through the WWOOF organization [click here for more about WWOOF].

If you happen to be traveling through Southwest Virginia, the Harvest Table is conveniently located right off Interstate 81; please stop by for a visit! [Find directions here.]

 

  Camille

For Camille ...

At the time of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle’s publication in the spring of 2007 I was a sophomore in college at Duke University. I received my Bachelor’s Degree in Biological Anthropology from Duke in the spring of 2009. In the two years since graduation I have been living in Asheville, North Carolina where I currently work as a baker and a yoga teacher. I am still writing and talking about local food, as well. My latest work was published in the March issue of Yoga Journal.

 

 

 

 

 

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