A thoughtful son sent Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, the new book Barbara Kingsolver has written with her husband, Steven Hopp, and daughter, Camille Kingsolver. It beautifully mixes the sweet pleasures of great food with bitter facts about conventional food production and transport. I find this book and the clear-mindedness behind it to be wonders.

From page 22: “Food is the rare moral arena in which the ethical choice is generally the one more likely to make you groan with pleasure.” Yes!!

From page 2, in one of many special sections Steven Hopp wrote: “Each food item in a typical U.S. meal has traveled an average of 1,500 miles….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. That’s not gallons, but barrels.”

From page 68: “Transporting a single calorie of a perishable fresh fruit from California to New York takes about 87 calories worth of fuel.”

We’ve got some changing to do. And it’s going to be delicious.