Join Friends of Princeton Open Space (FOPOS) at the Mountain Lakes House for a book club dedicated to readings about conservation, stewardship, and our relationship with nature. New book club members welcome!

Led by Diana Newby, FOPOS board member and faculty in Princeton University's Writing Program, we'll spend our third meeting discussing Barbara Kingsolver's book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. An award-winning fiction writer with degrees in biology and ecology, Kingsolver is known for novels that expansively explore human connections to the environment, including Prodigal Summer, which we read for our second session. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a work of nonfiction, is part memoir, part cookbook, and part manifesto for the locavore movement, recounting how the author’s family attempted to spend a whole year eating only locally grown food. As Kingsolver’s readers, we will take up her invitation to consider the practical, ecological, and ethical dimensions of what, how, and why we eat.

We will spend our first hour discussing Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, sharing impressions, reflections, and points of connection to the mission of FOPOS as well as our personal relationships with nature. In the last half hour, we will enact the book’s focus on locally grown food by sharing a small meal prepared with edible invasive plants foraged from Mountain Lakes. Book club participants are welcome—though not required!—to bring their own dishes inspired by Kingsolver’s recipes or made from locally grown plants.