Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

June 17, 2008 | By Doug In Planters |

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

Bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver returns with her first nonfiction narrative that will open your eyes in a hundred new ways to an old truth: You are what you eat.

“As the U.S. population made an unprecedented mad dash for the Sun Belt, one carload of us paddled against the tide, heading for the Promised Land where water falls from the sky and green stuff grows all around. We were about to begin the adventure of realigning our lives with our food chain.

“Naturally, our first stop was to buy junk food and fossil fuel. . . .”

Hang on for the ride: With characteristic poetry and pluck, Barbara Kingsolver and her family sweep readers along on their journey away from the industrial-food pipeline to a rural life in which they vow to buy only food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it. Their good-humored search yields surprising discoveries about turkey sex life and overly zealous zucchini plants, en route to a food culture that’s better for the neighborhood and also better on the table. Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle makes a passionate case for putting the kitchen back at the center of family life and diversified farms at the center of the American diet.

“This is the story of a year in which we made every attempt to feed ourselves animals and vegetables whose provenance we really knew . . . and of how our family was changed by our first year of deliberately eating food produced from the same place where we worked, went to school, loved our neighbors, drank the water, and breathed the air.”

Customer Review: What It Might Be Like
I enjoyed this book as a fun read.

The plot is kind of anti-climactic, but it gives the reader an idea of what might be involved to produce your own food.

Gardening and rasing animals takes knowledge and experience, and even a small garden can be daunting for someone who doesn’t know what to do.

There are little diversions throughout the book where the author tells about questionable practices in corporate food production. These are a little annoying when you already know about them, but for someone who didn’t, they could be eye-opening and helpful for finding better alternatives.

She also includes a few recipes.

The main things I liked about the book were that it was relaxing entertainment, and that it made me realize more about what’s required to garden and raise poultry.

Customer Review: A memoir, a polemic, a sermon, and a call to locavorism
Review - Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, by Barbara Kingsolver with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver

This book is several things, a memoir, a polemic, a sermon, and a call to locavorism. On a small Virginia farm a family decides to experiment for one year eating mostly homegrown and locally-grown food. The cast is acclaimed writer Barbara Kingsolver, who gardens and writes the narrative, professor-husband Steven Hopp, who is allowed in the kitchen to bake bread and writes sidebar essays, late-teen daughter Camille, who writes observations, pertinent recipes and meal plans, and nine-year-old Lily, an earnest poultry entrepreneur.

Kingsolver is an accomplished writer of mostly novels and is an alert and delightful wordsmith. In this nonfiction work, her writing is entertaining but lacks discipline; she bounces from object to subject like a child with too many toys. A chapter titled Molly Mooching (a Molly is a morel mushroom) provides history on the farm Steven bought some years ago, delivers an apologia for tobacco farmers, offers Appalachian flora trivia, takes us on a hunt for morels, puts potatoes and other early plantings in the ground, expounds on onions, interjects an essay by Steven titled Is Bigger Really Better? and concludes with Camille who writes Getting It While You Can, a teen’s perspective on her mother’s food plan and a recipe for Asparagus and Morel Bread Pudding. All of which is fun, disconcerting, and marginally useful.

In addition to politics and sermons, twenty chapters take us through planning, planting, preparing, eating and preserving. Titles include Springing Forward, The Birds and the Bees, Growing Trust: Mid-June, Eating Neighborly: Late June, Zucchini Larceny: July, and Life in a Red State: August, a double-entendre of tomatoes and more politics. For dessert we accompany Barbara and Steven on a two-week second honeymoon in Italy.

This book is a teaser. It titillates the reader with the benefits of home gardening but provides few gardening details; it teases with the compelling concept of locavorism but lacks inspiring success stories. Worst, it is na?ve. Experienced gardener-writers like Eliot Coleman, author of Four-Season Harvest, know and show how to keep a garden going year-round. Kingsolver apparently feels that the gardening world dies in autumn and does not reappear until asparagus pops up in spring.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is minimally useful as a reference book because, alas and inexplicably, there is no index. Thus, to remember the names of the six companies that control ninety-eight percent of the world’s seeds, one must flip pages and hope for a lucky find. (It is in Chapter 3, titled Springing Forward.) You could write your own index. You could underline extensively and write key words at chapter beginnings. My messy alternative is to apply little sticky notes next to items I may wish to find again, so my copy now looks like a yellow-feathered flat bird.

Back matter includes a bibliography, a list of organizations, and sources for Steven’s sidebar references. All of Camille’s recipes may be found on the web site: www.AnimalVegetableMiracle.com which has lots of photos. The site is a fun visit that puts a face on the people, the plants, and the animals.

I agree strongly with the locavore movement. The present food production system is a soil damaging, oil depleting, nutrition compromising scheme designed for corporate, not human health. For more on all that I recommend Michael Pollan’s books: Omnivore’s Dilemma, and, In Defense of Food.

Kingsolver has many fans so I hope that this book will create many converts to locavorism. But I’m skeptical, mindful of Steinbeck’s admonition that, “No one wants advice, only corroboration.” There is a plethora of advice in this book. But it will provide corroboration for those who are already concerned about the sad state of our food economy wherein any digestible item is supermarket available on every day of the year at great expenditure of oil and soil, at great reduction of flavor, at great loss to local communities and your checking account.

I have three pieces of advice for the Hoppsolvers (author construction): grow much more garlic, keep it in a cool place, not behind the kitchen stove, and, stop making your bread with flour that has been oxidizing since it was ground–grind wheat and other grains just before making your bread; it will be nutritionally superior and even more delicious.

In spite of being tossed from one subject to another time and again and learning almost nothing new about home food production, I enjoyed Kingsolver’s range of interests and her entertaining writing. So here’s a big thank you to all my homestead list friends who recommended that I read this book.

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