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NOTICE OF CHANGE: "A Breath of Snow and Ashes" by Diana Gabaldon has been cancelled.

Instead, we will discuss "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life" by Barbara Kingsolver. Along with being prepared for a great discussion, please bring a small dish (appetizer/dessert) to share.

Review from Publishers Weekly
Michael Pollan is the crack investigator and graceful narrator of the ecology of local food and the toxic logic of industrial agriculture. Now he has a peer. Novelist Kingsolver recounts a year spent eating home-grown food and, if not that, local. Accomplished gardeners, the Kingsolver clan grow a large garden in southern Appalachia and spend summers "putting food by," as the classic kitchen title goes. They make pickles, chutney and mozzarella; they jar tomatoes, braid garlic and stuff turkey sausage. Nine-year-old Lily runs a heritage poultry business, selling eggs and meat. What they don't raise (lamb, beef, apples) comes from local farms. Come winter, they feast on root crops and canned goods, menus slouching toward asparagus. Along the way, the Kingsolver family, having given up industrial meat years before, abandons its vegetarian ways and discovers the pleasures of conscientious carnivory.This field?local food and sustainable agriculture?is crowded with books in increasingly predictable flavors: the earnest manual, diary of an epicure, the environmental battle cry, the accidental gardener. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is all of these, and much smarter. Kingsolver takes the genre to a new literary level; a well-paced narrative and the apparent ease of the beautiful prose makes the pages fly. Her tale is both classy and disarming, substantive and entertaining, earnest and funny. Kingsolver is a moralist ("the conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners"), but more often wry than pious. Another hazard of the genre is snobbery. You won't find it here. Seldom do paeans to heirloom tomatoes (which I grew up selling at farmers' markets) include equal respect for outstanding modern hybrids like Early Girl.Kingsolver has the ear of a journalist and the accuracy of a naturalist. She makes short, neat work of complex topics: what's risky about the vegan diet, why animals belong on ecologically sound farms, why bitterness in lettuce is good. Kingsolver's clue to help greenhorns remember what's in season is the best I've seen. You trace the harvest by botanical development, from buds to fruits to roots. Kingsolver is not the first to note our national "eating disorder" and the injuries industrial agriculture wreaks, yet this practical vision of how we might eat instead is as fresh as just-picked sweet corn. The narrative is peppered with useful sidebars on industrial agriculture and ecology (by husband Steven Hopp) and recipes (by daughter Camille), as if to show that local food?in the growing, buying, cooking, eating and the telling?demands teamwork. (May)Nina Planck is the author of Real Food: What to Eat and Why (Bloomsbury USA, 2006).
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This meetup is only open to those who have rsvped yes to Helen's July meetup. Those signed up for the discussion portion at 7 (the discussion will probably start closer to 7:30 since the movie will run past 7), it is your choice if you want to come watch the movie beforehand. Also, if you can't make it by 5:30, feel free to come whenever you can to watch some of the movie.
In your rsvp, please indicate if you'd like to watch the 1948 version with Vivien Leigh or the 1997 version.
Also, I will order pizza from Pete's, please state on your rsvp what toppings you'd like.

We will be discussing The Red Tent by Anita Diamant. Please bring a small dish to share. If you are not signed up for this meetup and since this meetup is full, please rsvp to Juniper's on the 21st if you'd like to read and discuss The Red Tent.
In July, we will be discussing Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy; August, Ishmael by Daniel Quinn; and September, Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver.

In May, we will read and discuss Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See. Since we're meeting at Time Tested, please bring a small dish to share. Also, if you have not purchased the book yet, Time Tested has copies for you at a discount.
Our June book will be The Red Tent by Anita Diamant. Also, our June meetup will not be on the second Wed (13th), but will most likely be the first Wed (6th). In the months after, we will be reading Anna Karenina, Poisonwood Bible, and Ishmael -- please vote in the "polls" in what order you'd like to read them.