Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (Post 5)

While reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle I've been wondering what the Kingsolver family will eat during the winter.  They were canning tomatoes, other vegetables and fruits during the summer, but I still was not sure they would have enough.  In January Barbara Kingsolver is able to rest and seems to have a lot less to do.  She reads the paper while having warm soup for lunch and sitting by a crackling fire.  Of course she likes to read the food column.  She is upset by the writer who is writing about pesto with fresh, young basil leaves during the winter.  The basil leaves had stopped growing in her area about three months before.  They have to eat frozen pesto they made during the summer.  Many people ask her what her family eats during the winter.  She feels like they want a dramatic story of how they do not have enough food but instead she has to tell them that they "...just ate ordinary things like pasta with pesto, made ahead".  They have an abundance of food it is just all frozen or in the form of roots.  One thing that the Kingsolvers do not have that many people rely on during the winter is fish.  The omega-3 fatty acids that are prevalent in fish help with depression.  The beef that the Kingsolvers get locally during the winter "...has omega-3 levels up to six times higher than CAFO beef...".  This omega-3 would help them through the winter according to Kingsolver.  They eat a lot of squash because some varieties continue growing through the cold weather.   The family was surprised when they found that in "...January, it wasn't all that hard".  They also get about "...$7,500 of annual income" while in their year as locavores.

I never realized all the possibilities that there are for organic food during the winter, you just have to start early.  Also, I never realized all the economic benefits that local food has.  I have learned so much about organic and local farming from this book it's so interesting to know what is growing all year round.