with her rare mix of storytelling skills and a social conscience, best-selling author Barbara Kingsolver has built a career on the premise that a well-told story can move mountains. This May, her latest effort, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, tells an entirely new tale: her own. Spun around her family’s move to Virginia and their subsequent decision to eat only foods grown and raised in their county—including their own farm—Animal marries Kingsolver’s narrative gifts with reported essays from her husband, biologist Steven Hopp, and recipes from her then-19-year-old daughter, Camille. Plenty caught up with Kingsolver to talk about the local food movement, taking your dinner seriously, and why eating well is for everyone—not just the elite.

You started this project a few years ago, long before local food was on the cover of Time. Why did you decide to do it, and did your friends think you were crazy?

The truth is we were pretty quiet about it. We didn’t make any big announcement to our family or friends. We’ve been growing a lot of our food for years, and when we moved to the farm, it just came up: “How about if we try to produce all of it ourselves, or get it from our neighbors who are farmers?”

Did you have any moments of doubt?

We really didn’t. We didn’t try to be fanatical; this was not a religious conversion by any means. When friends invited us to their houses, we ate whatever they served, and if they had strawberries in January, we ate them and said, “Oh, wow, strawberries!” But we didn’t try to make it difficult—we tried to make it meaningful. If we needed to make an exception, like cranberries at Thanksgiving, we did it. We didn’t stress about it.

Were there any surprises?

Just that summer was the hardest time while winter was pretty easy—that was a huge surprise. We did so much of our work ahead of time [growing and preserving food] that eating locally in winter was relatively easy. And we were surprised we liked doing this so much. When the year officially ended, nothing fundamentally changed for us. Now, we’ll sometimes splurge on Alaskan salmon, or something from far away, but it’s a treat, not something normal. And I think that’s good.

How can changing what’s on your plate change anything besides dinner?

I think we’re under an obligation to serve as examples that we can do things differently, that we don’t need this industrial food pipeline. Once you begin to incorporate local products into your diet, it gets easier. And the more people do it, the easier it will get because we’ll be a significant body of consumers that farmers will be able to grow things for.

But isn’t it hard to take your food that seriously?

It feels a bit contrived to do that here, but we live in a culture that’s incredibly lazy about food. In Europe, even working mothers stop at the market, pick out the freshest vegetables, and make meals because that’s the way it’s done—and those cultures are not facing a crisis of health problems from bad eating. Attending to the sources of your food is not about crossing things off the list; it’s about creating a new culture of food that makes sensible connections between your body, the place you live, and the goods that place can give you.

It’s practical in a very basic, biological sense: Eat what’s available nearby like animals do.