I recently read a wonderful book called Animal, Vegetable, Miracle about one family’s experiences after they decided to grow their own food for a year.

They succeeded at a cost of around 50 cents per family member per meal.

The author is Barbara Kingsolver, who some of you would know from reading her novel Poisonwood Bible.

In 2005 she and her husband and two daughters moved from the Arizona desert to a small farm in the US Appalachian Mountains to realign their lives with the food chain and discover how to take charge of their food.

"Our highest shopping goal was to get our food from so close to home we’d know the person who grew it," Kingsolver wrote.

"Often that turned out to be us as we learned to produce more of what we needed."

But Kingsolver’s book is more than just a personal "back to the earth memoir".

It is based on her concern about US people’s lack of knowledge about the food that keeps them alive, and lack of a food culture.

"At its heart, a genuine food culture is an affinity between people and the land that feeds them," she said.

"Step one, probably, is to live on the land that feeds them, or at least on the same continent, ideally the same region.

"Step two is to be able to countenance the ideas of food and dirt in the same sentence, and three is to start poking into one’s supply chain to learn where things are coming from."

Kingsolver takes us through the family’s year of eating seasonally from spring 2005 when their asparagus was the first vegetable to make an appearance, through planting and harvesting fruit and vegetables, and drying, freezing and preserving the surplus to get the family through the harsh Virginia winter.

Her writing is interspersed with facts and figures about the state of the US food culture researched and written by her husband, and seasonal recipes and menus provided by her daughter, so it’s a family book about a family experience.

They used about a quarter of an acre of land for their "nutritional support".

With their off-farm purchases of organic grain for animal feed, flour for bread, and local farmers’ market purchases, they calculated that their family’s food footprint for the year was probably around one acre, compared with 4.8 acres for the average US citizen.

And they didn’t stop after one year. Today they are still growing their food, and eating locally with the occasional splurge.

If you can’t read the book, you can find their recipes and menus and progress recorded on their website www.animalvegetablemiracle.org