TracyFood

Book review: “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” by Barbara Kingsolver and family. 7 June 2007 1:33 pm

Posted by Tracy in : books, cheese, eating, garden, local food, milk, recipes, reviews, seasonality, sustainability , trackback

What can I say about this book that has not already been said? Local food is a hot topic right now, what with this book coming out at almost the same time as Plenty by Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon of the 100-Mile Diet, and so I started reading articles about Animal, Vegetable, Mineral even before I got my hands a copy. I’m reluctant to write anything that just repeats all the responses already in print (or online, as the case may be). Instead, I will give just a brief summary before proceeding directly to my personal responses, with a minimum of the general analysis that’s already been done in many other places.

Let’s see. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, subtitled A Year of Food Life, is the story of a year in which Barbara Kingsolver, along with her husband, Steven Hopp, and daughters Camille and Lily, “made every attempt to feed [themselves] animals and vegetables whose provenance we really knew” (9-10). To their credit, they spent a year or more preparing for the project, and an important step in that preparation was moving away from the suburbs of Tuscon, Arizona, to an area better-suited to growing food: rural Virginia, in particular the farm where Steven Hopps lived before he met Kingsolver, whose family are from that area. As Kingsolver writes in the introductory chapter, “Called Home,”

Our highest shopping goal was to get our food from so close to home, we’d know the person who grew it. Often that turned out to be us, as we learned to produce more of what we needed, starting with dirt, seeds, and enough knowledge to muddle through. Or starting with baby animals and enough sense to refrain from naming them. (10)

As the above passage suggests, and I discovered during my own “eat local” experiment (the relevant entries start here and continue for about a week), animal products are pretty important to a locavore diet; veganism might be impossible unless you’re lucky enough to live someplace that produces vegetable cooking oil. In fact, the Kingsolver-Hopp family made an exception to their locals-only rule for olive oil, as well as grains, although they did their best to procure the latter from a local mill (albeit one that used non-local ingredients) and “in the least processed, easiest-to-transport form available (bulk flour and some North American rice) so those food dollars would go mostly to farmers” (34). Each family member was also allowed one non-local “luxury item… in limited quantities, on the condition we’d learn how to purchase it through a channel most beneficial to the grower and the land where it grows” (35). Steven chose coffee, Camille dried fruit, Lily hot chocolate, and Barbara opted for spices — a pretty big loophole, but one that no doubt improved the family’s quality of life immensely that year. Of course, spices have always traveled, historically speaking, and are used in such small quantities that the environmental impact of transporting them is pretty negligible compared to, say, the vast quantities of feed trucked to a confinement dairy farm. (The family obtained milk products from local sources, but the book never mentions whether the cows supplying that milk are locavores themselves.)

Anyway. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is organized seasonally, around the growing year, starting in spring, just like almost every other book I’ve read in the past two months or so in my quest to find a book report subject for Urban Farm (Second Nature, Epitaph for a Peach, You Grow Girl, and even the godawful Coming Home to Eat by Gary Paul Nabham are all seasonally structured; only Safe Food wasn’t, and I didn’t finish that one anyway). Most of the book is devoted to the central narrative of the year, written by Kingsolver, but there are short sidebar-style articles by Steven Hopp about food politics and economics, the environment, local food, and more, with references and useful web links for further reader research. Several chapters end with a few pages of Camille Kingsolver’s thoughts about nutrition and seasonal meal planning, complete with recipes. At least one reviewer called these sections “rather clumsy,” and I’m inclined to agree; despite some delicious-sounding recipes, one of which I will discuss at greater length shortly, I thought Camille’s contributions were by far the weakest parts of the book. (That same reviewer preferred Smith and MacKinnon’s Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally, which I may actually read now that Animal, Vegetable, Miracle has persuaded me that narratives about eating local don’t have to be an ordeal — my other favorite book on the subject of local food, Brian Halweil’s Eat Here: Reclaiming Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket, is much more journalistic and less literary.) Camille’s younger sister Lily, appears with the rest of the family on the back cover author picture, but was too young for a book contract and so couldn’t get her name on the front cover, just very cute hands full of heirloom lima beans. Inside the book, she is the subject of many charming anecdotes, mostly about her chicken and egg business.

So. All that said, what’s special to me personally about Animal, Vegetable, Miracle? Well, for starters, I got my copy of this book as a gift from my mother, who could not resist the title. Her father-in-law, my dad’s father, my late grandfather whom I never knew, was a lawyer, a diabetic, and a picky eater. Whether you can imagine the ensuing nutritional arguments or not, there’s one in particular that’s particularly relevant. Asked if he had eaten any vegetables one day, my grandfather replied that of course he had — strawberries. Delicious, sugary strawberries, exactly the thing to inspire worries of diabetic doom. When my mother protested that those didn’t count, he retorted that as berries were neither animal nor mineral, they clearly had to be vegetables. That left her stumped, and my parents still laugh about it. So based on the title alone, this book had a head start with me and my family.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle also had a head start with me by virtue of its author. After the disappointment of Coming Home to Eat, I resolved that I would give the local food book genre one more try with Barbara Kingsolver’s latest, because at least I knew I appreciate her writing. (So did the nurse at my last Planned Parenthood appointment, who was very excited to hear that I liked the new book, and that was fun.) Of her other books, I have only read The Poisonwood Bible, but that one is amazing. I also liked her introductory essay to The Essential Agrarian Reader: The Future of Culture, Community, and the Land (one of the texts for my sustainable agriculture class), and echoes of that piece turn up in Animal, Vegetable, Mineral as well. I think I’m too city-oriented to appreciate Kingsolver’s comments on rural life and values, which are a little too Wendell Berry for my taste, but we’re very much on the same page about the importance of knowing and loving your food, including the places it came from. Although her tone in this book is at times a little self-righteous, especially in the passages that offer nothing new to anyone who’s read The Omnivore’s Dilemma, I appreciated her sense of humor and thoughtful descriptions of simple everyday tasks like cooking. (I’m a sucker for good writing about cooking, especially food made at home.)

Finally, the very first thought I put to paper after finishing Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and resolving to write about it: this book made me want to try making my own cheese. Apparently, I am just not enough of a DIY hippie-punk (or maybe I’m just in a super-crafty mood, what with the homemade pita bread and way too much interest in the “build it” projects in You Grow Girl). The cheesemaking (and more) chapter, “Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast,” was probably my favorite part of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and not just for the culinary inspiration of the “try this at home!” kind. It also had many of the previously-mentioned meditations on home cooking, and a really good discussion of lactose intolerance, right down to the biochemistry. I’m genuinely envious of the way Kingsolver explains the reason why cultured dairy products are more digestible — namely, they’re made by treating milk with bacteria that eat away the lactose. Wow! Of course! How simple, how straightforward and sensible! I want some yogurt just thinking about it, and I’m looking forward to trying the recipe for “30-Minute Mozzerella.” For that matter, the passages about gardening made me want to put down the book and whisper sweet nothings to the plants in my front yard, with lines like, “Nothing is more therapeutic than to… disappear into the yellow-green smell of the tomato row for an hour” (177). Even when the book’s lyrical descriptions did distract me away from reading, it was also compelling enough that I kept coming back, and that can’t be bad. For all its ups and downs, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle inspired me to try new things in my kitchen and garden, and for that, I count it a rousing success.