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Summary
Summary
Bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver chronicles her family's relocation to a community of organic food growers in southern Appalachia, in an experiment to spend a year eating only locally- or home-grown foods. Along the way, they discover a new appreciation for the natural processes of food production.
Author Notes
Barbara Kingsolver was born on April 8, 1955 in Annapolis, Maryland and grew up in Eastern Kentucky. As a child, Kingsolver used to beg her mother to tell her bedtime stories. She soon started to write stories and essays of her own, and at the age of nine, she began to keep a journal. After graduating with a degree in biology form De Pauw University in Indiana in 1977, Kingsolver pursued graduate studies in biology and ecology at the University of Arizona in Tucson. She earned her Master of Science degree in the early 1980s.
A position as a science writer for the University of Arizona soon led Kingsolver into feature writing for journals and newspapers. Her articles have appeared in a number of publications, including The Nation, The New York Times, and Smithsonian magazines. In 1985, she married a chemist, becoming pregnant the following year. During her pregnancy, Kingsolver suffered from insomnia. To ease her boredom when she couldn't sleep, she began writing fiction
Barbara Kingsolver's first fiction novel, The Bean Trees, published in 1988, is about a young woman who leaves rural Kentucky and finds herself living in urban Tucson. Since then, Kingsolver has written other novels, including Holding the Line, Homeland, and Pigs in Heaven. In 1995, after the publication of her essay collection High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never, Kingsolver was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from her alma mater, De Pauw University. Her latest works include The Lacuna and Flight Behavior.
Barbara's nonfiction book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle was written with her family. This is the true story of the family's adventures as they move to a farm in rural Virginia and vow to eat locally for one year. They grow their own vegetables, raise their own poultry and buy the rest of their food directly from farmers markets and other local sources.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Michael Pollan is the crack investigator and graceful narrator of the ecology of local food and the toxic logic of industrial agriculture. Now he has a peer. Novelist Kingsolver recounts a year spent eating home-grown food and, if not that, local. Accomplished gardeners, the Kingsolver clan grow a large garden in southern Appalachia and spend summers "putting food by," as the classic kitchen title goes. They make pickles, chutney and mozzarella; they jar tomatoes, braid garlic and stuff turkey sausage. Nine-year-old Lily runs a heritage poultry business, selling eggs and meat. What they don't raise (lamb, beef, apples) comes from local farms. Come winter, they feast on root crops and canned goods, menus slouching toward asparagus. Along the way, the Kingsolver family, having given up industrial meat years before, abandons its vegetarian ways and discovers the pleasures of conscientious carnivory. This field--local food and sustainable agriculture--is crowded with books in increasingly predictable flavors: the earnest manual, diary of an epicure, the environmental battle cry, the accidental gardener. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is all of these, and much smarter. Kingsolver takes the genre to a new literary level; a well-paced narrative and the apparent ease of the beautiful prose makes the pages fly. Her tale is both classy and disarming, substantive and entertaining, earnest and funny. Kingsolver is a moralist ("the conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners"), but more often wry than pious. Another hazard of the genre is snobbery. You won't find it here. Seldom do paeans to heirloom tomatoes (which I grew up selling at farmers' markets) include equal respect for outstanding modern hybrids like Early Girl. Kingsolver has the ear of a journalist and the accuracy of a naturalist. She makes short, neat work of complex topics: what's risky about the vegan diet, why animals belong on ecologically sound farms, why bitterness in lettuce is good. Kingsolver's clue to help greenhorns remember what's in season is the best I've seen. You trace the harvest by botanical development, from buds to fruits to roots. Kingsolver is not the first to note our national "eating disorder" and the injuries industrial agriculture wreaks, yet this practical vision of how we might eat instead is as fresh as just-picked sweet corn. The narrative is peppered with useful sidebars on industrial agriculture and ecology (by husband Steven Hopp) and recipes (by daughter Camille), as if to show that local food--in the growing, buying, cooking, eating and the telling--demands teamwork. (May) Nina Planck is the author of Real Food: What to Eat and Why (Bloomsbury USA, 2006). (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
New York Review of Books Review
A FEW years ago, the novelist Barbara Kingsolver packed her husband and two daughters into a car and left their home in Tucson for good, resettling on a farm in southern Appalachia. Their intention was to spend a year of their new rural life eating only what they could grow themselves or buy from local suppliers. The plan was no whim. Kingsolver and her husband, Steven L. Hopp, a biologist who teaches environmental studies, had been raising fruit and vegetables at Hopp's farm every summer since they met. Kingsolver, it emerges, is hardly unsuited to her new project, documented in "Animal, Vegetable, Mineral," an engaging amalgam of memoir, environmental reporting and how-to book. She won the Betty Crocker Homemaker of Tomorrow Award in 1972 and studied biology in college and graduate school. Deeply frugal, she was raised in Kentucky among people who still remembered the hunger of the Depression, and she herself recalls qualifying for food stamps in the odd-jobs days before she hit the best-seller lists. Her activism also started early, when she watched farmers founder as they tried to wean themselves from tobacco. Things are better now. Kentucky farmers sell pasture-raised pork, lamb and turkey, and even "Kentucky caviar" from farmed fish. The farmers' market supplies salad greens when it's only starting to get warm. Local farms have meat and eggs year-round. Supermarkets become quick stops for dairy products and locally milled flour. Rules are bent for spices, and each family member gets a wild card at the outset: Kingsolver's husband logically picks coffee (fair-trade and organic, it goes without saying), though the fresh fruit that her older daughter, Camille, craves is a bit too much (she has to settle for dried). So the hardship of Kingsolver's planned abstinence isn't that great. Nevertheless, with the passing months, the rigors of sticking to the seasons sink in. Economic and physical realities sink in too. Kingsolver's 9-year-old, Lily, goes into the poultry business, calculating how many eggs and chickens she must sell to earn money for a horse. Death as a part of life - and, especially, eating - is unavoidable. Lily won't name her chickens, so she can face killing and selling them. Her mother, an unapologetic meat-eater, points out that vegetarians kill living plants, not to mention the insects and field animals that inevitably fall to the harvesting process. "You can leave the killing to others and pretend it never happened," she writes, "or you can look it in the eye and know it." As for sweat and mud, no one shies from either. Kingsolver finishes one May evening "aching and hungry" and decides that "labors like this help a person appreciate why good food costs what it does. It ought to cost more." This is a message Americans can't hear often enough. So are the many others Kingsolver has researched with admirable thoroughness, delivering them with a casual urgency that only occasionally veers into preachiness. ("California vegetables are not the serpent, it's all of us who open our veins to the flow of gas-fueled foods.") The book is a useful guide for the apprentice activist, picking up where Kingsolver's friend and mentor Joan Dye Gussow left off with "This Organic Life." Kingsolver's husband contributes sidebars on the hazards and inequities of industrial agriculture, along with advice on how to make yourself heard at the local supermarket and by legislators debating farm bills. Kingsolver remains aware of how challenging most readers will find her program. It comes as a relief, for instance, when she says that stress-reducing Fridays are invariably pizza night - and then it turns out that the pizza is made from scratch. But she generally succeeds at adopting the warm tone of a confiding friend who can win you over with self-deprecating, you-too-can-make-cheese-every-day enthusiasm. And she does want you to think seriously about following her example, even if you're gardenless. At the end of the year, she finds that she has fed her family for under 50 cents a head per meal. "It doesn't cost a fortune, in other words. Nor does it require a pickup truck, or a calico bonnet." What is likely to win the most converts, though, is the joy Kingsolver takes in food. She isn't just an ardent preserver, following the summertime canning rituals of her farming forebears. She's also an ardent cook, and there's some lovely food writing here. The proper time for "grabling" a new potato - searching underground with your fingers; who knew that verb? - is "just before dinner: like corn, new potatoes are sweetest if you essentially boil them alive." Kingsolver's older daughter, Camille, who goes off to college midway through the experiment, is a bred-in-the-bone cook too. She contributes postscripts to each chapter with sensible nutrition information and friendly, often easy recipes with much of her mother's polished, engaging manner. "Animal, Vegetable, Mineral" moves at an absorbing pace - especially the first two thirds, with all the adventure of laying out a garden and organizing a farm that can largely sustain a family, and with engaged, meaty reports on Kingsolver's coming up to speed with current food politics. The last third has its longueurs, especially an extraneous expedition to Italy, where naturally (and a bit implausibly) everyone eats with perfect respect for food and companionship. An account of Kingsolver's foray into turkey husbandry seems protracted, although it does set up a suitably moving and celebratory conclusion. The link Kingsolver adds to the "locavore" movement, if we agree to adopt that name, is a human one - not just to the people who grow and make food but to the people who eat it together. "When I'm cooking," she writes, "I find myself inhabiting the emotional companionship of the person who taught me how to make a particular dish, or with whom I used to cook it." This sharing, along with a dirt-under-the-fingernails appreciation of the food in the ground and on the table, is the heart of the book. You get the idea that Kingsolver was sorry when the year was over and the rules could be relaxed - although her daughter wasn't sorry to get that horse. Corby Kummer is a senior editor of The Atlantic Monthly. His most recent book is "The Pleasures of Slow Food."
School Library Journal Review
Adult/High School-This book chronicles the year that Barbara Kingsolver, along with her husband and two daughters, made a commitment to become locavores-those who eat only locally grown foods. This first entailed a move away from their home in non-food-producing Tuscon to a family farm in Virginia, where they got right down to the business of growing and raising their own food and supporting local farmers. For teens who grew up on supermarket offerings, the notion not only of growing one's own produce but also of harvesting one's own poultry was as foreign as the concept that different foods relate to different seasons. While the volume begins as an environmental treatise-the oil consumption related to transporting foodstuffs around the world is enormous-it ends, as the year ends, in a celebration of the food that physically nourishes even as the recipes and the memories of cooks and gardeners past nourish our hearts and souls. Although the book maintains that eating well is not a class issue, discussions of heirloom breeds and making cheese at home may strike some as high-flown; however, those looking for healthful alternatives to processed foods will find inspiration to seek out farmers' markets and to learn to cook and enjoy seasonal foods. Give this title to budding Martha Stewarts, green-leaning fans of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth (Rodale, 2006), and kids outraged by Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation (Houghton, 2001).-Jenny Gasset, Orange County Public Library, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Guardian Review
For twelve months, American novelist Barbara Kingsolver and her family committed themselves to eating only what they could plant, feed, grow, harvest and slaughter by their own hand on their Appalachian farm. If there was an occasional bare day in the Kingsolver cupboard it would be filled by a quick trip (in their hybrid car) to the local farmers' market. Otherwise, it was just them, a hen coop and more left-over zucchini than you could shake a hoe at. You could probably guess from Kingsolver's bestselling novel of 1999, The Poisonwood Bible , that she already had leanings in that direction. The story, which followed a missionary family as it attempts to bring God to the 1950s Belgian Congo, thrummed both with the disciplines of daily domesticity and the slightly sinister super- abundance of the natural world. In Animal, Vegetable, Miracle , Kingsolver expands on the roots of that particular sensibility. She was born into a farming community in postwar Kentucky and grew up knowing that everything - your bank balance, emotional health, college fund - depended on this year's harvest. What made this knowledge a tricky, unfashionable burden was that the harvest in question happened to be tobacco, which was fast becoming seen as the devil's weed in the more health-conscious - that is rich, powerful, urban - states of America. So, right from the start, Kingsolver comes to her project with a sharp awareness of how rural economies really work and the difficult choices they require of the would-be ethical consumer. Not for her the dreamy reverie in which most shoppers float round Whole Foods with a chic string bag reaching for vegetables whose carefully charted provenance makes them sound like fidgety racehorses. Instead, Kingsolver describes a daily programme of exhausting tough love in which she is frequently called upon to snap the neck of a chicken she has raised as tenderly as her own children, or force her faintly sulky family into eating the same root vegetable five days on the trot. Her point is this: there is no morally or aesthetically pure way to eat, simply a series of trade-offs that each of us must muddle through until we find something that allows us to sleep at night. Vegans, then, will have to count the fossil fuels they squander in order to keep themselves in bananas and tofu. Vegetarianism, while sounding lovely, will not work in the scrubby marginal lands where most of the world's poor live. Finally, home freezers may belch goodness-knows-what carbon nasties into the atmosphere, but they keep summer-harvested broccoli on the table right through the vitamin-D deficient days of January and February. You pays your money and you takes your choice. It all sounds preachy, but Kingsolver's secret weapon is her glorious wit. What could have been a worthy saga about an achingly nice family and their battles with potato blight becomes a richly comic narrative that manages to haul itself up just short of slapstick. In one of the book's finest episodes, she takes us through the romantic and reproductive life of the turkey, the closest thing America has to a native crop. Shockingly, 99.9% of turkeys are the product of a turkey baster, in other words they have been conceived by artificial insemination. Once the eggs are laid it is virtually universal practice to roll them immediately into incubators and warm them into life with large electric lights. As a result, all maternal instinct has been bred out of America's turkeys, which now, when left to their own devices, either ignore their eggs or stamp on them and eat the yolkey mess. Kingsolver's mission to teach her birds parenting skills is not just sentiment but good science (she is a biologist by training). By reintroducing the mothering instinct into her flock through natural selection - the well-parented chicks grow up to pass on the caring gene to the next generation - she is ensuring that the breed remains viable independently of all that expensive and fallible technology. Or, as she puts it, "having no self-sustaining bloodlines to back up the [poultry] industry is like having no gold standard to underpin paper currency" (the fact that there hasn't been a gold standard for decades doesn't detract from her project). The only time her tart good sense lapses into soft-focus cliche is when she talks longingly about the way that European countries, including Britain, have managed to stay closer to their own good earth. To hear her talk, you would think that every French artisan and Italian housewife regularly pull their dinner out of their own backyard before gathering a picturesque extended family around their loving dinner table for a three-hour meal. Even London, apparently, is an Eden of "cosy, packed-in personal gardens" bristling with luscious veg. "How did Europeans, ancestral cultures to most of us," keens Kingsolver rhetorically, "somehow hoard the market share of Beautiful?" At which point it becomes difficult to keep a straight face. When she stays on home ground, however, she makes a lot of sense. Her narrative is extended and deepened at regular intervals by sidebars from her husband Steven and teenage daughter Camille. Steven contributes the science bit, giving us chapter and verse on the sheer rottenness of the global food economy, while Camille, a nutritionist, does the recipes. It could all be a bit Waltons -ish, but Barbara Kingsolver is a sufficiently shrewd writer to make sure that Animal, Vegetable, Miracle stays just the right side of smug. Kathryn Hughes's The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton is published by Harper Perennial. To order Animal, Vegetable, Miracle for pounds 15.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875. Caption: article-kingsolver.1 You could probably guess from [Barbara Kingsolver]'s bestselling novel of 1999, The Poisonwood Bible , that she already had leanings in that direction. The story, which followed a missionary family as it attempts to bring God to the 1950s Belgian Congo, thrummed both with the disciplines of daily domesticity and the slightly sinister super- abundance of the natural world. In Animal, Vegetable, Miracle , Kingsolver expands on the roots of that particular sensibility. She was born into a farming community in postwar Kentucky and grew up knowing that everything - your bank balance, emotional health, college fund - depended on this year's harvest. What made this knowledge a tricky, unfashionable burden was that the harvest in question happened to be tobacco, which was fast becoming seen as the devil's weed in the more health-conscious - that is rich, powerful, urban - states of America. As a result, all maternal instinct has been bred out of America's turkeys, which now, when left to their own devices, either ignore their eggs or stamp on them and eat the yolkey mess. Kingsolver's mission to teach her birds parenting skills is not just sentiment but good science (she is a biologist by training). By reintroducing the mothering instinct into her flock through natural selection - the well-parented chicks grow up to pass on the caring gene to the next generation - she is ensuring that the breed remains viable independently of all that expensive and fallible technology. Or, as she puts it, "having no self-sustaining bloodlines to back up the [poultry] industry is like having no gold standard to underpin paper currency" (the fact that there hasn't been a gold standard for decades doesn't detract from her project). - Kathryn Hughes.
Kirkus Review
With some assistance from her husband, Steven, and 19-year-old daughter, Camille, Kingsolver (Prodigal Summer, 2000, etc.) elegantly chronicles a year of back-to-the-land living with her family in Appalachia. After three years of drought, the author decamped from her longtime home in Arizona and set out with Steven, Camille and younger daughter Lily to inhabit fulltime his family's farm in Virginia. Their aim, she notes, was to "live in a place that could feed us," to grow their own food and join the increasingly potent movement led by organic growers and small exurban food producers. Kingsolver wants to know where her food is coming from: Her diary records her attempts to consume only those items grown locally and in season while eschewing foods that require the use of fossil fuels for transport, fertilizing and processing. (In one of biologist Steven's terrific sidebars, "Oily Food," he notes that 17 percent of the nation's energy is consumed by agriculture.) From her vegetable patch, Kingsolver discovered nifty ways to use plentiful available produce such as asparagus, rhubarb, wild mushrooms, honey, zucchini, pumpkins and tomatoes; she also spent a lot of time canning summer foods for winter. The family learned how to make cheese, visited organic farms and a working family farm in Tuscany, even grew and killed their own meat. "I'm unimpressed by arguments that condemn animal harvest," writes Kingsolver, "while ignoring, wholesale, the animal killing that underwrites vegetal foods." Elsewhere, Steven explores business topics such as the good economics of going organic; the losing battle in the use of pesticides; the importance of a restructured Farm Bill; mad cow disease; and fair trade. Camille, meanwhile, offers anecdotes and recipes. Readers frustrated with the unhealthy, artificial food chain will take heart and inspiration here. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
What happens when the beloved novelist and her family decide to settle in southern Appalachia and eat only food that's available locally. With a 12-city tour; one-day -laydown. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle Chapter One Called Home This story about good food begins in a quick-stop convenience market. It was our family's last day in Arizona, where I'd lived half my life and raised two kids for the whole of theirs. Now we were moving away forever, taking our nostalgic inventory of the things we would never see again: the bush where the roadrunner built a nest and fed lizards to her weird-looking babies; the tree Camille crashed into learning to ride a bike; the exact spot where Lily touched a dead snake. Our driveway was just the first tributary on a memory river sweeping us out. One person's picture postcard is someone else's normal. This was the landscape whose every face we knew: giant saguaro cacti, coyotes, mountains, the wicked sun reflecting off bare gravel. We were leaving it now in one of its uglier moments, which made good-bye easier, but also seemed like a cheap shot--like ending a romance right when your partner has really bad bed hair. The desert that day looked like a nasty case of prickly heat caught in a long, naked wince. This was the end of May. Our rainfall since Thanksgiving had measured less than one inch . The cacti, denizens of deprivation, looked ready to pull up roots and hitch a ride out if they could. The prickly pears waved good-bye with puckered, grayish pads. The tall, dehydrated saguaros stood around all teetery and sucked-in like very prickly supermodels. Even in the best of times desert creatures live on the edge of survival, getting by mostly on vapor and their own life savings. Now, as the southern tier of U.S. states came into a third consecutive year of drought, people elsewhere debated how seriously they should take global warming. We were staring it in the face. Away went our little family, like rats leaping off the burning ship. It hurt to think about everything at once: our friends, our desert, old home, new home. We felt giddy and tragic as we pulled up at a little gas-and-go market on the outside edge of Tucson. Before we set off to seek our fortunes we had to gas up, of course, and buy snacks for the road. We did have a cooler in the back seat packed with respectable lunch fare. But we had more than two thousand miles to go. Before we crossed a few state lines we'd need to give our car a salt treatment and indulge in some things that go crunch. This was the trip of our lives. We were ending our existence outside the city limits of Tucson, Arizona, to begin a rural one in southern Appalachia. We'd sold our house and stuffed the car with the most crucial things: birth certificates, books-on-tape, and a dog on drugs. (Just for the trip, I swear.) All other stuff would come in the moving van. For better or worse, we would soon be living on a farm. For twenty years Steven had owned a piece of land in the southern Appalachians with a farmhouse, barn, orchards and fields, and a tax zoning known as "farm use." He was living there when I met him, teaching college and fixing up his old house one salvaged window at a time. I'd come as a visiting writer, recently divorced, with something of a fixer-upper life. We proceeded to wreck our agendas in the predictable fashion by falling in love. My young daughter and I were attached to our community in Tucson; Steven was just as attached to his own green pastures and the birdsong chorus of deciduous eastern woodlands. My father-in-law to be, upon hearing the exciting news about us, asked Steven, "Couldn't you find one closer?" Apparently not. We held on to the farm by renting the farmhouse to another family, and maintained marital happiness by migrating like birds: for the school year we lived in Tucson, but every summer headed back to our rich foraging grounds, the farm. For three months a year we lived in a tiny, extremely crooked log cabin in the woods behind the farmhouse, listening to wood thrushes, growing our own food. The girls (for another child came along shortly) loved playing in the creek, catching turtles, experiencing real mud. I liked working the land, and increasingly came to think of this place as my home too. When all of us were ready, we decided, we'd go there for keeps. We had many conventional reasons for relocation, including extended family. My Kingsolver ancestors came from that county in Virginia; I'd grown up only a few hours away, over the Kentucky line. Returning now would allow my kids more than just a hit-and-run, holiday acquaintance with grandparents and cousins. In my adult life I'd hardly shared a phone book with anyone else using my last name. Now I could spend Memorial Day decorating my ancestors' graves with peonies from my backyard. Tucson had opened my eyes to the world and given me a writing career, legions of friends, and a taste for the sensory extravagance of red hot chiles and five-alarm sunsets. But after twenty-five years in the desert, I'd been called home. There is another reason the move felt right to us, and it's the purview of this book. We wanted to live in a place that could feed us: where rain falls, crops grow, and drinking water bubbles right up out of the ground. This might seem an abstract reason for leaving beloved friends and one of the most idyllic destination cities in the United States. But it was real to us. As it closes in on the million-souls mark, Tucson's charms have made it one of this country's fastest-growing cities. It keeps its people serviced across the wide, wide spectrum of daily human wants, with its banks, shops, symphonies, colleges, art galleries, city parks, and more golf courses than you can shake a stick at. By all accounts . . . Animal, Vegetable, Miracle . Copyright © by Barbara Kingsolver. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
