Book Review/Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
Book Review
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A year of food life
By Barbara Kingsolver
with Stephen L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver
HarperCollins Publishers
Hardcover $26.95
By BILL DUNCAN
The News-Review
If you are thinking this is a typical novel from the prolific pen of Barbara Kingsolver you are in for a surprise. — a pleasant surprise. This is not another "The Poisonwood Bible" the best-selling book and Kingsolver’s most daring, complex novel set in the Congo when the family of a missionary must cope with more than a strange world.
It will be a pleasant surprise because Kingsolver is an excellent writer who, in this book, which is part memoir, part journalistic investigation, tells the story of how her family was changed by one year of deliberately eating food produced in the place where they live. While Barbara wrote the central narrative three writers contribute to this book. Her husband Steven’s sidebars dig deeper into various aspects of food-production science, while her daughter Camille’s brief essays offer a nineteen-year-old’s perspective on the local-food project, plus nutritional information, meal plans and recipes.
Camille’s recipes are inviting in themselves, such as Eggplant Papoutzakia. Over all the book is an entertaining, thought-provoking book about the very sustenance of life — the food we eat.
Barbara begins her narrative with, "The story about food begins in a quick stop convenience market." With that sentence she takes the reader on a year of food life." The stop at the convenience market was on her way out of Tucson, Ariz. enroute to a farm in Virginia. At the market, she paints this brief scenario:
"’Dang, it’s going to rain,’ the store cashier frowned.
‘I hope so,’ Steven said.
‘It better not,’ the cashier replied.
‘But we need it," I pointed out.
‘I know that’s what they are saying, but I don’t care. Tomorrow is my day off and I want to wash my car,’ the cashier responded."
This anecdote was to explain that this attitude is now endemic among a supermarket dependent nation. "Living in Arizona on borrowed water made me nervous," she wrote.
"My husband and I decided our children would not grow up without knowing a potato has a plant part," she wrote. "We would take a food sabbatical, getting our kids into some of the actually dying art of food production. We hoped to prove — at least to ourselves — that a family need not depend for its life on industrial food."
She admits writing the book is a crusade to make Americans aware of where their food is coming from and hopefully change the dependency on eating fruits and vegetables out of the normal season simply because they can be trucked in over long distances — even from other countries.
Her objective is also to explain why we can’t continually depend on food sources that are literally manufactured for our convenience while the consumer, you and I, are not willing to the pay the farmer a reasonable price for local produce. In the book, she sort of sums up what a character said in Wendell Berry’s novel, "Jayber Crow," which is about farmers struggling to produce food for what urbanites are willing to pay. The character comments, "I’ve wished sometimes that the SOBs would starve and now I’m getting afraid they actually will. The time was going to come — it was clear enough now — when there would not be enough farmers left."
Kingsolver wants to bring America back to its agrarian roots, even it is a small backyard plot. She explains the miracle of the seed, such as the tomato, that begins so small, yet grows taller than she is and produces bushels of nutritious, red globes on every plant.
Many families are already making a difference, she said, by buying organically grown food, shopping for produce at local farms, at farmer’s markets and even producing some of their own food in backyard gardens. She said it was her fondest wish that "our children will eventually know how vegetables grow from seeds, farm animals grow on pasture and how whole ingredients can be made into meals right in the kitchen."
This is not a Pollyanna story, but one that reveals growing one’s own food requires hard work, but the end result is worth the challenge.
Weeding, she said, is an endless chore, but she found solace in the task and remarked, "it’s commonly said that humans remember pleasure but forget pain, and this is the only reason women ever have more than one child." After her endless weeding, she quipped:
"I was thinking of having one garden."
She also discovered that you can’t run away on harvest day. In the fall when it is harvest time, what the garden has provided doesn’t wait as conveniently as the produce section in the supermarket that has lulled consumers to believe you have every known vegetable out of season. When the harvest comes, it is now and often involves around the clock picking, preparing, canning, freezing and storing what the earth has given.
Barbara and her family did exactly that and recorded it month by month in "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle," written in Barbara’s unique, poetic style with clever similes and metaphors and often humor about her experiences in "A Year of Food Life."
"I’ve kept a journal for most of the years I’ve been gardening," she said. "I’m a habitual scribbler, jotting down the triumphs and flops of each season."
Her book is not only excellently written, but should be a wakeup call to America.
(Bill Duncan is editor of The Senior Times. He also writes a weekly column each Thursday on the Opinion Page of The News-Review.)