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.
Book Review: Blessed Unrest
February 15, 2008
Blessed Unrest by Paul Hawken
Every now and then I come across a book that is better than the stereotype of what it should be. With most of the books I’ve read on environmental issues, the authors tend to talk in circles or rehash someone else’s thoughts and theories. The end result is that they all sort of blend together and come off as cliché.
Not with Paul Hawken’s Blessed Unrest. Hawken writes a book heavy on stories and comprehensive in histories. His basic premise is that the environmental movement is not something that is new to the 21st century, despite what Oprah and her cloth shopping bags may make you believe. But rather that the environmental movement has been operating just under the surface for a while and it is only just now beginning to bubble to the surface at the level of popular culture.
Blessed Unrest is the story of the environmental movement’s multiple streams that have moved throughout history that are now beginning to merge into one river of environmental consciousness.
This is a book about the growing number of organizations and people who are restless with the current options in regards to the environment, human rights, justice, sustainability, etc.
Blessed Unrest tells of how these organizations and groups have been moving under the radar for the last couple of decades, moving independently of each other, with no “mission statement” or organizing agenda, culminating in the growing changing tide for change in how view and operate in the world. Hawken argues that no one owns this movement and no on can control it. Rather, that it is the world’s for the world.
Hawken then spends time discussing the “blessed” roots of much of the groups and organizations and how their unrest is deeply rooted in their spirituality, faith, and vision for the world. Far from saying their spirituality is an effort to colonize the world for “environmental justice”, the point is that many of these individuals and groups are beginning from a starting point that wants to integrate their faith with their “blessed” responsibility to be good caretakers of the world. To prove this point, the author leans heavily on the thoughts of Emerson, Thoreau, Gandhi, and King and provides insights into how their faith and values shaped their perspective to become agents of change. He then brings it back full circle and reminds us that our responsibility as agents of change, is to live fully and integrated with ourselves (faith), others, and our environment. This is no small task, but one that is built of the “still small voice of God” that stirs in each of our spirits, that remind us that things are not as they could or should be.
What makes this book so rich is that Hawken doesn’t deal with pie-in-the-sky ideals or theories. Rather he shares the raw, honest, successful, and even failed attempts at sustainability. Instead of providing black and white concrete models for us to follow, he instead simply shares the stores of hope and optimism and lets them do what they have the power to do, inspires us to follow in their foot steps one small step at a time to affect change in a world desperate for it.
