While I was at my parents’ house last week, I picked up my mom’s copy of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, something I had been kind of avoiding prior to that point.  Avoiding, because I had heard about it from so many people who kept telling me how it made a huge difference in the way they ate, cooked, shopped for food, etc., and reading a book that was going to make me feel like making a big change in my life is about as high as “Color Code My Panty Drawer” on my list of priorities.  I am in much more of a fingers-in-the ears LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU kind of place these days.  Plus, I am not in the market for guilt.  I received a brand spankin’ new load of that on October 29 and Goodwill will not accept the gently used guilt I already have laying all over the place, not even when I tell them I don’t need a receipt for it.  And so in regards to this book, I have repeatedly said, in the nicest possible way:  kindly take your locally grown, organic, grass fed book and shove it.

But then one evening as I was disrobing for my nightly bath (quick moment of silence for being back in the Land of the Tubless.  ……………… ) I realized I was without reading material, and as I planned on soaking until I reached raisin fingered nirvana, I knew I would be needing something to occupy my mind for the duration. Enter The Book.

Here’s the thing.  That damn Barbara Kingsolver can write.  She’s like a witch with her voodoo words and spell casting chapters.  I can count on no hands the number of times I have made any kind of baked good from scratch.  My thumb is black as night.  It is a very real and sure fact that I will never in my life own a live chicken. But after half an hour with her book I’m flipping through her recipes, wondering if I’ve missed tomato planting season and calculating how much chicken wire I’ll need for my backyard coop.  INTERNET, THIS IS RIDICULOUS.

However, I am glad that I read this book.  Not only because of the urge I now feel to buy local food and perhaps try a tomato plant or two and just be less of a greedy food consumer asshole in general, but also because of the reason I feel that urge: stellar writing.  I closed the back cover of that book a changed person, all because of words on a page.  Words carefully and artfully chosen by someone who had a vision for crafting them into something that would make even the most ignorant among us (read: ME) give a whoop.  That’s powerful stuff right there, wouldn’t you say?

So the (now not so) dreaded book inspired me to more conscientiously consume my food.  But also?  It inspired me to write.

I’ll take my fingers out of my ears for that.