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 naïve. 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: [...] 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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Renewed Our Spirits and Brought the Family Back to the Kitchen and Back to the Table.
I borrowed this book from the library initially, our CSA was having a February "book club" read, and this was the book. My husband and I have gardened to one extent or another since we married almost 40 years ago, and he grew up on a working farm. When our 30 something children were young we had 3,000 square feet under cultivation in vegetables to eat, freeze, can, sell to the local food co-op and give away.Now we're on our second round of children. We are older, tired and we'd moved away from our fertile loamy soil to sand, acidity and bands of marauding white-tailed deer. We hardly gardened the past 3 years.Then we found this incredible, life altering book. Actually, the book is not incredible. Barbara Kingsolver's lyrical prose, written with wisdom, humor and truth, was able to bring my husband and I back to the path that led to the local farmer's market, a local CSA (community sustainable agriculture)and gardens of our own again. Her words, and those of her daughter and husband, brought us back into the kitchen, they brought us back to the table, together again as family, to prepare and eat meals together, to talk, to be happy and to be relaxed with one another.We were able to get the book on CD Animal, Vegetable, Miracle CD, and my husband and I listened to it every evening, enraptured with every chapter, every story, every success and every failure. We felt as though we were living through the Kingsolver family's year of local food and living with them. As the story progressed, so changed our family. We started baking bread again with this fun book Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day: 100 New Recipes Featuring Whole Grains, Fruits, Vegetables, and Gluten-Free Ingredients ordering organic, locally grown and produced meats, poultry, vegetables and fruit from local growers through the West Michigan Food Co-Op and even going together with other friends to order organic grains and legumes in bulk through a local distributor.I could write forever the ways this book has changed our family, really fundamentally changed the way we think about food, our local farmers, our earth and sustainability and our community. Much of what we learned, we knew already, but in disjointed news-bites and fragmented memories of our young married (gardening) life. "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life" gave us new facts, refreshed old ones and pulled all the information into a beautiful story book, a wonderful primer for living. Thank you to Barbara and her family for showing us the way.Additional Note: I've purchased copies of the book for my boss, my adult children, siblings and myself since that first copy I read was from the library!
Top reviews from other countries
Morvan
Incredibly interesting book. Full of hope, concrete information and poetry!
Reviewed in France on February 11, 2016DalVeg
Beautiful story of food, farming, and family.
Reviewed in Canada on January 3, 2013
Dr. K. E. Patrick
The "how to", "why to" story of eating locally
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 8, 2012