Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

Uh, oh. I think this book may have changed my life. I’ve been WWOOFing in Italy for several months by now, and the start of this book sounded pretty much like a preachy summary of everything I had been doing and learning since March. Her voice droned on, broken up occasionally by the voices of her husband and daughter, all harping endlessly on the same concepts, the same preaching-to-the-choir ideals. Only for the second half of the book did I feel I had gained much of anything, though for reasons I’ll avoid ranting about here, the chapter describing her vacation to Italy caused me physical pain. At the start, she goes into details about where she and her family are moving from, where they are moving to, and why they opted to cross show more the country. Her reasons for starting the whole project may not have appealed to me because they so obviously lined up with my own reasons for coming across the Atlantic and beginning a year of agriculture training abroad; her passionate, well-defended reasons didn’t seem so smart since I had already come up with them myself. Likewise, her initial farming tips didn’t strike me as particularly mind-blowing or original. Further along her family’s journey, however, I began to see the differences between her commitment and mine, and the information she brought to light astounded me. As I imagine her lawyers vehemently directed her, she barely grazes the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the revolting relationship between seed catalogues and seed company Monsanto. Her informative sections on the business of raising chickens with her daughter highlighted a different side of chicken-raising than my current chicken-coop-cleaning lifestyle has. Her jokes about being up to her elbows in both zucchini AND tomatoes in August rang very, very, very close to home – as did her less humorous bits about the endlessness of weeding did. And, of course, her immense amount of material on turkey sex had me laughing while weeding my Italian zucchini. In all of this laughing, though, she emphasized the serious moral and ethical motivations behind her choices. In particular, her debate about vegetarianism, with her eldest daughter’s opinion included, proved thought-provoking – very rarely in this type of literature, as far as I can tell, do you find an exceptional amount of pro-meat writing. As someone who has toyed around with the pros and cons of each side of this debate, I found her and her daughter’s ideas informative, well spoken, and convincing. (Basically, the only meat they eat is free-range; they know for a fact that their victims led respectable lives before death. Thus, they’re also eating less meat; their health benefits as the animals do.) I’m set to read more of this kind of literature in the future, and I’m also feeling inspired to find a way to make this kind of lifestyle more realistic for myself when I return to the states. show less

What could be subversive about a vegetable garden? Simple leaves, roots, fruits and seed doing as they were created to do in your backyard before you bring them into your kitchen--how could this wholesome exchange of energy unsettle an established institution?

Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a muse's song, reveals with vivid beauty and piercing truth what has been hiding in plain sight.

It calls for the citizens of the United States to collectively compose an epic hero and finally recognize the abuse of mealtime, food culture, food animals and animal husbandry, agricultural biodiversity, small farms, local economies, and planet earth and its inhabitants for the sake of a convenient daily life and the siren song of show more "efficiency".

But is not the lifestyle of modern America bloated with abnormality? Either out of ignorance or apathy we filed for divorce from the land that sustains our breath and claimed independence from the communities that shelter us. We forgot that nourishing a patch of green for one's own nourishment is an activity for survival, political or no.

We are the hero, but our heroism is not in transcending our human scale to slaughter a juggernaut. It's precisely in submitting to the bounds of our humanity. show less

I really enjoyed this, part memoir and part food polemic and all well-written and gave me much to think about. Even though it was written nearly 20 years ago, the issues have not changed and, in fact, are more urgent. I think she did a good job of telling what they decided to do in eating locally and growing much of their own food but then letting the reader figure out how they want to apply it, if at all. The insets by her family gave a different spin and I was incredibly impressed by her daughter Lily, the egg baron! I don't know how many of my habits will change but I think some. Thought provoking in a good way.

So much of this book I loved, especially the day to day experiences around growing your own food and raising livestock. My favorite descriptions were about raising turkeys and what it takes to successfully breed them. Kingsolver as the narrator of this audiobook made me laugh out loud several times. I loved how she described all of thei work on their farm, but it would have been refreshing if her kids and husband had rebelled even a little bit! They were incredibly accommodating and helpful all the time.

I wasn't a fan of the lecture feeling parts of the book. I wish I could buy all my food from local sources and in season- and I do for the most part, but this isnt realistic for a lot of individuals. Rather than hunkering down with her show more own family (who seem to have unlimited means) I would have loved to hear about her using her influence to help address the urban food deserts we have across the country.

It is funny that she is described as one of the 100 most dangerous people in the US. Heck I think we need more dangerous people like her. show less

After years of spending summers at her husband's farm in southwestern Virginia, growing as much food as possible, Kingsolver and her family moved there permanently from Tucson, with a plan to spend one full year living off what they could raise themselves, or obtain from local sources, and documenting the results. No Twinkies, bananas, or pre-packaged anything. A very few exceptions were allowed---coffee (as long as it was fair trade), flour (for which a local source turned out to be a disappointment), olive oil (from Italy where they KNOW about organics and sustainability in a way that Americans just don't). This is the story of how that year went, and it's fascinating, instructive and entertaining. Ain't no way I'm going to be a show more self-sustaining gardener, and my deed restrictions won't let me have so much as a couple laying hens on the property even though we're pretty rural here, but I do favor the idea of knowing where our food comes from, being mindful of the seasonality of things, and understanding the true cost of those bananas and almonds and New Zealand lamb chops in the overall scheme of things. A criticism I sometimes hear of Kingsolver, is that she "gets preachy"...well, there's no doubt she has opinions and is proposing that things should change, but I never detected a self-righteous tone or got any sense that she felt she had the Solution for Mankind. When she points a finger, it is at Monsanto, not at individual consumers. She does not try to make us feel guilty for where we are, but offers a map for where we might go from here. She pokes fun at herself (there is a LOT of humor in this book), acknowledges that most people cannot do what she and her family did, admits to her failures, lets us in on HER guilty secrets (inability to function without Ziplock bags or live without coffee; constant presence of boxed mac & cheese in her pantry for one of her younger daughter's friends who simply would not eat anything else--"No child is going to starve on my watch"), and offers practical advice on how to make the changes you CAN make. She and her husband are both scientists, and the research offered in the book is impressive without being oppressive. Some of the data suggests that even small adaptations in the way we shop for food could make enormous differences in our dependence on agribusiness and fossil fuels over time, which in turn could improve our health, and the health of our planet. There are recipes, and sidebar essays written by her daughter, Camille, who at the time was studying biology at Duke. I checked to see whether Camille had written anything more, and found this update from HarperCollins Publishers: "Camille Kingsolver graduated from Duke University in 2009 and currently works in the mental health field. She is an active advocate for the local-food movement, doing public speaking for young adults of her own generation navigating food choices in a difficult economy. She lives in Asheville, N.C., and grows a vegetable garden in her front yard." The book includes a list of organizations that offer support for the local food/sustainability movement. Of the first 12 websites listed, only one link was defunct when I checked it, so the book remains a viable resource for current information on an important subject. Highly recommended.
review written in August 2015 Book published in 2007 show less

Summary: After realizing how divorced the average American is from the source of the food that they eat, how we've become used to purchasing any produce, from anywhere in the world, in any season, and how much gasoline goes into growing, processing, and shipping most of the things we eat, Barbara Kingsolver and her family decided to try an experiment. For one year, they decided that they would eat only local food: things they could grow or raise themselves, or that were produced within a hundred miles of their home. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is the story of that year, organized into chapters by month, and peppered with short factual pieces contributed by Kingsolver's husband and recipes and menu planning tips by her daughter. It's a show more story of farmers, of cooks, of waiting for the first shoots of asparagus that signal the beginning of spring, of being overwhelmed by zucchini, of convincing turkeys to breed without human assistance, of the best way to fail spectacularly at making pumpkin soup, and of celebrating the tiny miracles of life by paying attention to the food we use to sustain it.

Review: I didn't want to read this book. Barbara Kingsolver is one of my top three favorite authors, possibly my favorite author, and yet I did not want anything to do with this book. The reason is a simple one: I hate to be made to feel bad about what I'm eating. It's the reason I try to avoid dining with militant vegetarians, people who talk about their Weight Watchers points, and anyone who is horrified that I grew up eating (and still prefer) ketchup with my pork chops. I've been lectured at about food many times before, and I can't stand it, and no matter what anyone told me about Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, I was convinced that it was going to be more of the same... and as a result, I wanted no part of it.

So imagine my surprise when I finally (and grumpily) started reading it, to find that not only was it not lecture-y at all, but that it was also completely fascinating, actively inspiring, and compellingly readable. Kingsolver's fiction will always be my first love, but she's an accomplished non-fiction writer as well. It didn't hurt that Animal, Vegetable, Miracle was written in my favorite style of non-fiction: mostly memoir-ish personal experiences blended seamlessly into the more journalistic factual sections.

An added bonus was that the setting for Animal, Vegetable, Miracle was in rural southern Appalachia, which is an area of the country that I know and love, as well as being the same setting as Prodigal Summer, my far-and-away favorite Kingsolver novel. In fact, it was almost immediately clear upon starting Animal, Vegetable, Miracle that the fictional Widener family farm, setting of the "Moth Love" chapters in Prodigal Summer, was drawn almost entirely from her real-life homestead. So even if the tone of the book got a little too lecture-y, at least I was on familiar ground.

But the thing was, I rarely felt like I was being lectured at. Kingsolver's obviously very passionate about the topic, but she lays out her arguments logically and persuasively, appealing to the scientist and pragmatist in me. What's better, although the rational argument underlies everything, the prose dwells more on the personal immediacies of the issue: the small "miracles" of the title, the joy of eating cherries right off the tree and the wonder of holding a newly-hatched chick, rather than the important but substantially less tangible benefit of saving the environment. Kingsolver's prose is as rich and wonderful as ever, equally adept at evoking a field of tiny green asparagas shoots, a hunt for mushrooms in the Appalachian forests, and a homey kitchen full of tomatoes to be canned.

Despite how warm I found Kingsolver's prose and how accessible I found her argument, I had a hard time turning off the part of me that hates feeling guilty about what I eat. Even when I was absorbed in the story, there was still a small part of my brain that kept up a constant litany of complaints that sounded obnoxiously whiny, even to me. "But I don't wanna give up tea and grapefruit and Oreos! I don't wanna spend every free minute of the summer slaving over a steaming canning bath! I don't wanna never eat an avocado again unless I move to the Southwest, and I don't wanna move to the Southwest!" I couldn't shut this voice up, despite the fact that Kingsolver never once suggested that I do any of those things. In fact, she's very sympathetic to the fact that becoming a dedicated locavore is not an easy undertaking, that her family is unusual, and that not everyone has the time, money, or acreage to produce all of their food themselves. (On the other hand, she does such a good job of describing the joys of growing and making your own food that I often found myself wishing for a house with space to garden, and I'm seriously considering attempting to make my own cheese.)

The thing was, despite my whining and my resistant heel-dragging, I kept running up against a factoid that was presented early on in Chapter 1: if every U.S. citizen ate one meal per week from local, organic food, we would save 1.1 million barrels of oil every week. Just one meal. 1.1 million barrels per week. One meal. I can do that. And Animal, Vegetable, Miracle has convinced me that it might even be enjoyable. 4.5 out of 5 stars.

Recommendation: Anybody who's ever bought tomatoes in January, bagged lettuce in November, or bananas anywhere north of the Tropic of Cancer. Also, obviously, anyone who's interested in food and food culture, anyone who's concerned about our planet's dwindling supply of fossil fuel, and anyone who likes Kingsolver's writing style. show less

This was a fascinating read. Written in 2008 but still relevant today, Kingsolver and her family move to the Appalachias and decide to eat only what they can find locally. I would be fixating on all the foods that I wouldn't be able to eat but Kingsolver focuses on the abundance (or gluts) of vegetables that they grew themselves, and animals, and bought the rest at local farmers' markets.

There were several elements that stood out. The first was that procreation has been bred out of turkeys - they are reared and eaten before that can happen, the second was making mozarella in your own home - fascinating process - and the fact that we ask young people to wait to have sex but we can't wait for a tomato to be in season and so buy them all show more year round when they are tasteless.

She writes well and the snippets of science that her husband added and recipes from her elder daughter were a valuable inclusion. Kingsolver does not give us a warts and all story, it is probably a highly edited version but her message about choosing to eat local produce is a mindset and when you have chosen it, you prioritise it so that you manage it. Lots of reviews say they couldn't manage it because they are working, don't earn her sort of money (which of us does?) or have the space. They are defensive arguments by people who feel that they can't do the same thing. But this is Kingsolver's journey to better eating, no one else's and everyone else's journey will look different. What she says is if you commit to eating like this, you give up other things in order to be able to do so because it is the most important thing for you at this point. She did it for a year and obviously elements that they found worthwhile they repeated the next year.

It was a great book for our gardening book club and really made us think about what we are eating and why. show less