A review of Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle:

This is in response to Flaxbee's request that I write a review of this 2007 book about Kingsolver's year of living off the land.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
Barbara Kingsolver, with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver
P.S./HarperCollins Pub., N.Y., copyright 2007


Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is a work of clarity and demonstrated practicality, and as such, supremely threatening. Threatening to Food, Inc., threatening to the custodians of the mass market, above all threatening to ourselves. Kingsolver, the best-seller novelist, essayist, and story-teller, took her family to the hills of Virginia with the mission of eating local and au naturel for a year. They grew most of their own food and bought locally to plug any dietary holes. In were berries and apples, out were grapefruit and oranges. They not only survived, they prevailed, as daughter Camille's robust recipes (seeded throughout) attest.

Her's was not a moralizing quest. She admitted to a few hundred pounds of flour not available nearby, the family graciously accepted meals from non-involved friends, and openly promoted Plan B: buying from other local growers at the farmers' market (for many of us, this may be the most practical choice). Nor did she draw a grim line-in-the-sand between vegetarianism and meat-eating. The Kingsolvers raised heirloom chickens and turkeys, and bought local "grass-finished" beef and lamb. In fact, Kingsolver gave a rather stout defense of eco-friendly herding: "I'm unimpressed by arguments that condemn animal harvest while ignoring, wholesale, the animal killing that underwrites vegetal foods. Uncountable deaths by pesticide and habitat removal -- the beetles and bunnies that die collaterally for our bread and veggie-burgers -- are lives plumb wasted." She went on to call the hand of some vegetarians when it came to livestock: "They're [livestock] human property, not just legally but biologically. Over the millenia of our clever history, we created from wild progenitors whole new classes of beasts whose sole purpose was to feed us. If turned loose in the wild, they would haplessly starve, succumb to predation, and destroy the habitats and lives of most or all natural things." Sentimentality has a limited role in the Kingsolver family pantry.

Daughter Camille made up recipes and weekly meal plans, Husband Steven Hopp number-crunched and demystified agriculture lore, and youngest daughter Lily tended to the schedules of poultry and eggs. If it isn't clear by now, one has to keep book on not only the costs but the timing of stuff going into the ground and stuff coming out again. And what of that ground, that land? Doesn't a well-off writer have the luxury to buy a farm few others could afford? Well, yes. But that misses the point. The Kingsolver family didn't (and couldn't) utilize all the land on their place's hilly terrain. Maybe you have enough land already. "It wasn't a lot of land: 3,524 square feet of tilled beds gave us all our produce... one doesn't eat a nature preserve." When land for fruit trees and berry bushes and pasture was figured in, the land total rose to all of one-quarter acre. Add in flour grain, market purchases and Kingsolver estimated her family of four's "foot print" for a year at one acre, less than 25% of what a family needs on the modern agriculture grid. That grid is estimated to provide only .6 acre-per-person by 2050, down by half from what is needed now.

That brings up a disturbing outlook. Increasingly, Kingsolver hears of friends keeping two months supply of food on-hand. Nothing unusual by farming standards a century ago, but why now? "Food security is no longer the sole concern of the paranoid schizophrenic," she reports. Nor, it seems, is it fear of terrorism or a duck-and-cover nuclear holocaust. "Global climate change has... opened the season on catastrophes we are ill-prepared to predict."

Practical points abound: "The time to think about [winter shortages] would be in August," or "Cooking is good citizenship. it's the only way to get serious about putting locally raised foods into your diet, which keeps farmlands healthy and grocery money in your neighborhood," or "if a friend had a coronary scare and finally started exercising three days a week, who would hound him about the other four days?" Kingsolver brooks little tolerance for those demanding "absolute conversion." "Search out redemption where we can find it: recycling or carpooling or growing a garden or saving a species or something."

If we feel a little threatened by this book, maybe it's time to do something about it; action is, after all, the best antidote to fear. Steven Hopp summed it up simply. "By pushing the market with our buying habits, we continually shape our buying choices, and the nature of farming." And that will change not only the shape and use of the land, but change how we control our own lives.

(Eleanors38, 2013)