Animal, Vegetable, Miracle – Book Review
April 28, 2008
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: Year of Food Life
by Barbara Kingsolver with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver.
Two years ago, in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan showed us how we got to the point of needing investigative journalists to tell us where our food comes from. Now, in her newest book, Barbara Kingsolver shows us how delicious a closer relationship with our food can be: for a year, she, her husband, and her two daughters chose to eschew all oily foods. No, not fried foods or things made with butter or sizzling chicken skins—they meant things like pineapples, bananas, and, for that matter, bunches of basil or gallons of soymilk—if they’re being shipped in gas-guzzling vehicles, instead of being raised in their rural Kentucky county. They began this project to bring their food choices into line with their family values, which include, Kingsolver writes, “love your neighbor” and “try not to wreck every blooming thing on the planet while you’re here.”
And the story Kingsolver tells is in every way a story about family and about that second part of Christ’s greatest commandment. In cutting themselves off from the industrial food chain they’re concerned about peak oil and global warming but also about the small local producers—their neighbors—who are less and less able to survive by raising food in this country, where most consumer’s food-purchasing habits (as well as government legislation) favor the large and the industrial; the plastic-wrapped and petroleum delivered. Feeding themselves locally becomes a family project; even their fourth-grader, Lily, keeps her family (and others in their community) supplied with eggs and meat from her own organic, free-range chickens, and the celebratory meals following each harvest—the asparagus, the tomatoes, the chicken—are family affairs, cooked and enjoyed together. Concern for the environment and for others who share it begin the project—but a taste for good food, as well as the family intimacy that’s fostered by raising, cooking, and eating together–keeps it going.
Kingsolver’s enthusiasm is infectious—she manages to make you wish you were there for the day spent dispatching and eviscerating poultry, and her energetic writing makes this book so much more than a primer on seasonal eating. Although it is, in many ways, a primer: she succeeds in demonstrating that it’s not merely possible but in fact preferable to eat locally and seasonally, both in terms of taste and even—in a certain sense—simplicity. After all, if you keep to the seasons of the year and to what’s available in your garden, at your farmer’s market, or in your CSA share, not only are you getting what’s freshest and tastiest (have you ever had a strawberry in January that didn’t taste like water?), but deciding what’s for dinner is also much simpler than if you’d walked into your ‘local’ giant supermarket. Particularly inspiring were the sections that ended each chapter, written by Camille Kingsolver, that offered practical nutritional wisdom as well as delicious sounding recipes (asparagus and morel bread pudding, rhubarb crumble, cherry sorbet) and weekly meal plans based around each season’s bounty.
Certainly the family’s experiment won’t be repeatable for many (if not most) people; raising, preserving, and cooking most of the food for a family of four requires things that many of us don’t have: space for a garden, root cellar, and a large pantry, knowledge of animal and plant husbandry as well as food preservation skills, and, obviously, a lot of time. However impractical it might be to try and replicate everything Kingsolver and her family does, they do a good job of showing that it’s more than possible—and profitable—to go ahead and do something to improve your food’s fuel-efficiency—planting a small garden, perhaps, or seeking out a farmer’s market or CSA program. (As Stephen Hopp points out in one of his richly informative contributions, if every American would eat just one locally and organically produced meal per week, it would reduce our oil consumption by 1.1 billion barrels each week). And Kingsolver insists that the most important ingredient in pursuing a local diet is attitude—the willingness and discipline to wait for an in season tomato. However, they make eating local sound so attractive that one can’t help but long to set one’s own eating habits to the pattern of anticipation and fulfillment that is the cycle of such discipline.
Some of Kingsolver’s background in evolutionary biology is evident in the book; this maybe off-putting for certain evangelical readers, but I think that they will be won, in the end, by the essential Christian-ness of her entire project: it is, after all, a project that has at its heart the goal of learning to eat in a way that is loving to all one’s neighbors—those around the world who are impoverished by American overconsumption, those in our communities who could flourish by producing food for us, if only we would rely on them for our daily bread, those with whom we sit to eat each day, and the next generation, who will have to deal with the aftereffects of our eating habits when we’re gone. Kingsolver also demonstrates, in telling her family’s story, an astoundingly sensible (and, in my estimation, Biblical) perspective on humanity’s role in caring for the earth— and the lives both animal and vegetable—that God has placed on it.
RACHEL STONE taught English at a small Bible college in California before taking off across the continent (and the ocean) to live in a small Scottish university town with her husband and their now-2 year old son. She enjoys baking bread, writing, reading, running, and finding new ways to live in joyful simplicity.
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