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Barbara Kingsolver and her family venture forward in envirovore consciousness in her new book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (Harper Collins, 2007.)
The Kingsolvers are moving permanently to Southern Appalachia, and for one year, they resolve to eat only food that they or their neighbors produce. Exceptions will be made (coffee, olive oil, cranberries at Thanksgiving) but the rigor of the exercise is not the point of this book. Rather, the book is at once an elucidation of our current industrial food system and an exploration of the alternative ways one family finds to eat.
In the beginning of the book, in late March, we see Kingsolver’s family holding their breath as they plunge into a new dependence on their community’s farmers and their own back yard. By August, Kingsolver is canning like mad in a kitchen where every surface is covered with tomatoes from her garden. And in September, she’s plotting ways to unload squash secretly on her neighbors.
In the meantime, her eight-year old daughter Lily starts her own egg and chicken business (“How many eggs would it take to buy a horse, Mom?”) and Kingsolver resolves to rekindle the forgotten passion of turkey sex.
Highly entertaining stuff – especially the turkeys. But the real value of the book lies in Kingsolver’s ability to sandwich humorous stories of her family’s back-to-the-landing in between expositions of the very real implications (read: oil dependence, dissolution of the family farm and community, and lack of food security) related to industrial agriculture.
She also uses candid revelations of her friends’ lack of knowledge about food (“The potato has a plant part?” asks one of her chef friends) as a tool to explore the general invisibility of food production in this country.
And she’s not afraid to call her readers to practical action from time to time. “You can’t save the whales by eating whales, but paradoxically, you can help save rare, domesticated foods by eating them,” Kingsolver puts out there while throwing dirt on monocropping.
Seasonal recipes and commentary from her older daughter Camille, as well as some excellent, informed food history essays from her husband, Stephen, are sprinkled throughout, providing different perspectives on the experience and adding richness to the book.
Kingsolver’s unabashed can-do attitude provides a practical backbone for the information she presents in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and her humor allows the reader to fly through it almost without realizing they’re being educated.
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The only complaint I would have about the book is how torturous it is to read nearly an entire chapter on the wonders of asparagus, to the point where my mouth is watering, only to discover it's only seasonally available for a few weeks of the year. And no, not this week.