Barbara Kingsolver tells students about her family's adventure as they move to a fram in southern Appalachia and spend a year on a locally-produced diet, realigning their lives with the local food chain and paying close attention to the provenance of all they consume.

In that year, they find themselves eager to move away from the typical food scenerio of American families: a refrigerator packed with processed, factory-farmed food transported long distances using nonrenewable fuels, and in their search for another way to live and eat, they begin to recover what Kingsolver considers our nation's lost appreciation for farms and the natural processes of food production.