the subject of mushrooms

Last summer when I returned from Europa, Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life both challenged and inspired me to live more local with more sustainable eating practices no matter where I may call home. [Note to prospective readers: at points you have to push yourself to keep reading, since Kingsolver can and does spend pages just describing asparagus, but the journey with her family to deliberately grow/eat locally for one year is absolutely worth it.]

Now, after living in Europa for the past six months, I've returned multiple times to a Speaking of Faith interview where Krista Tippett talks with Barbara Kingsolver about this year of food life. Such good stuff. Here's the full podcast, if you want to listen in for yourself: The Ethics of Eating

Below, taken from the podcast, describes a bit of what I love about Europa -- just one of the things I hope to glean from my time spent here...

Barbara Kingsolver: It's so interesting to me when I'm in Europe and spend time with my Spanish friends or Italian friends, and they are working people too. They're women who are working in offices or, you know, they're editors or are laboratory scientists. And as soon as they're out of work, they head straight for the market. And they go down to see what fish has come in or what greens do they have now at this season. And even at high-powered business lunches with editors in France — this has happened to me so many times — these women in their fashionable shoes and business suits will stray from post-colonial literature over to the subject of mushrooms. And, you know, there's no shame in their enthusiasm for cooking. They feel that cooking for their families is a really important part of who they are. This, I think, is that, at the heart of the problem for a lot of us, anyway, I think I belong to the generation of women who grew up thinking that walking away from the kitchen was walking away from some kind of slavery, you know? It's how we think about it.

Krista Tippett: Yes, you're right. If we thought of cooking as this great pleasure that we could look forward to at the end of the working day, I suppose that would change it.

Barbara Kingsolver: If we look at it as family time, as entertainment, as a spiritually enlightening even, you know, if we look at it as a destination rather than a rock in the road, I think we would do more of it. And not every day, maybe not on Monday nights, OK, but definitely on Saturday.