Academic

Faculty Blogs: Review of Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

The final draft of my book review is now available.  Here's the abstract.

Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life is a must-read for lawyers and legal scholars in the areas of food law, environmental law, agricultural law, and education law. Indeed, I recommend it to anyone interested in the future of the planet or our children. The over-arching point of Kingsolver's book is that Americans should eat more locally-grown food. Kingsolver's position is that eating locally-grown food promises to be part of the solution to several of the major problems facing us at the start of the 21st century, such as global warming and childhood obesity. Many of the issues that Kingsolver addresses are legal ones, and many of the implications of her arguments also bear on legal topics. This review discusses the legal issues raised by the book and provides annotation to relevant legal articles, including articles on increasing opportunities for food production in local economies; global warming; childhood obesity; the Federal Farm Bill; the Plant Variety Protection Act of 1970; pesticide pollution and loss of wildlife habitat; lawsuits involving patented plant varieties; laws and regulations related to genetically modified foods; labeling laws governing Recombinant Bovine Somatotropin Hormone; proposals to reduce the public health risks of mad cow disease in the United States; green zoning; local ordinances governing community gardening; elimination of the regulatory quota system for tobacco; and the National Animal Identification System.

Full post as published by University of Louisville Law Faculty on October 02, 2009 (boomark / email).