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Chicken Poop for the Soul: In Search of Food Sovereignty Kristeva Dowling Halfmoon Bay, BC: Caitlin Press, 2011. 256 pp. $26.95 paper.
CHICKEN POOP for the Soul is, in part, a personal journal documenting Kristeva Dowling's quest to take more control of the food she consumes by spending eighteen months growing, foraging, bartering, hunting, and fishing for enough food to be selfsufficient. It is also an important contribution to the literature on local food and farming. This is not a "how-to" book but, rather, a book that describes the various ways Dowling acquired the practical skills to fill her freezer and pantry with home-grown and processed food. For anyone over the age of fifty, most of these domestic skills are within living memory, having been passed down from grandmother to mother to daughter. For younger generations, new tools and techniques are required, and Chicken Poop provides good advice based on practical experience - with a few recipes thrown in for good measure. Postwar prosperity and the popularity of commercially prepared foods led to a decline in the growing and raising of food for personal consumption. This decline is also linked to the growth of urban populations in Canada. In 1931, one in three Canadians lived on a farm (Trant 2008), and people were more connected to the growing and processing of food for home consumption, whether they lived in cities or rural areas. These foodrelated connections were at the core of every community, as Dowling soon discovered when she began to farm at her home in Hagensborg in the...