Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, the popular, best-selling narrative that tells the story of how the author’s family was changed by one year of deliberately eating food produced in the place where they live, has been selected for Virginia Tech’s Common Book Project for the 2010-11 academic year.Now in its 11th year, the Common Book Project gives new and transfer undergraduate students a common academic experience during their first year at Virginia Tech. Faculty teaching first-year students are encouraged to integrate the common book into their curriculum to foster broader community discussions on important themes or issues and enhance student learning through engagement in support of the university’s Quality Enhancement Plan.

“As in years past, the Common Book Committee made the choice with both faculty and student input,” said Mary Ann Lewis, director of first year experiences in the Division of Undergraduate Education. “Last fall, the committee decided to continue with the sustainability theme for the 2010-11 common book choice. Over winter break, committee members, as well as additional faculty and staff and more than 20 undergraduate students read several books and ultimately selected Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.”

Part memoir, and part journalistic investigation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (HarperCollins Publishers, 2007) provides the reader with new ways to more deeply understand an old truth: You are what you eat. Kingsolver, who resides in Southwest Virginia, wrote the central narrative; her husband, Steven L. Hopp, wrote sidebars that look into various aspects of food-production science and industry; and her daughter, Camille Kingsolver, contributes brief essays offering perspective from a 19-year-old on the local-food project.