Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

After reading Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma (which I thoroughly enjoyed), I moved on to "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle", only to find it a ridiculous fantasy-farming manifesto. Nauseatingly holy. Apart from the content (which I'll get to in a moment), the tone of the book was smug, self-satisfied and arrogant. This is NOT the way to encourage people to eat local, fresh, healthy food. And don't get me started on the daughter's writings - she seemed even more impossibly arrogant, convinced in her supremacy because of her diet and lifestyle. She also, interestingly, seemed to have a vendetta against vegetarians. Suppressed guilt, maybe? As a small organic farmer myself, I found myself staring in disbelief at the content of the book, and how abstract from reality it was. How much money did this family have? Clearly hundreds of thousands of spare dollars to spend on their "experiment". Example: In my part of the world, a tractor costs $55,000, yet they seemed to have no problem affording one. There seemed to be little connection or understanding of the real cost of living for real people - including farmers. (Yes, we all traipse off to Italy for holidays regularly!) How this was intended to have anything at all to do with farming and organic traditions is beyond me. (And I won't even get started on the hypocrisy of waxing lyrical about the zero carbon miles of homegrown food and cruising around in a fancy hybrid car, yet flying halfway across the world for amusement.) Likewise, few problems with vermin such as rabbits, rats, mice - the list goes on - ever showed their tails between the pages of the book. Maybe the sanctimonious tone kept them at bay? Weeds are mentioned, but do they ever cause crop failure? No. No problems with storms (my entire hazelnut crop is gone this season from two bad storms in a row), water restrictions, GM taint, or a host of other nasties real farmers deal with either. The book exists in a cartoon fantasy vacuum where all goes well and food is never eaten by grasshoppers right out of the ground. The real "miracle" of "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" to me is that none of these real farming everyday issues seemed to pose a problem to the obviously insanely wealthy "landed gentry" Kingsolver crew. Am I cynical and critical about the book? Absolutely. Because the truth is, Kingsolver portrays her book as fact, yet clearly she has left most of the unsavory and difficult truths out of the story. It's an edited, prettied-up, ideologized fiction. If it were sold as such, fine. But the fact it is sold as organic, homegrown truth rankles with this small organic farmer battling rabbits and rampant free-range chickens. In short, if an author is going to tell the a "back to the land" story, at least do it honestly, out of respect to her audience, and to those of us who actually work the land every day. And if we're going to encourage people to eat local, maybe a little humble pie might be a friendlier offering than this self-satisfied gump.