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Summary
Summary
Hang on for the ride: with characteristic poetry and pluck, Barbara Kingsolver and her family sweep readers along on their journey away from the industrial-food pipeline to a rural life in which they vow to buy only food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it. Their good-humored search yields surprising discoveries about turkey sex life and overly zealous zucchini plants, en route to a food culture that's better for the neighborhood and also better on the table.
Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle makes a passionate case for putting the kitchen back at the center of family life, and diversified farms at the center of the American diet.
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 (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In her engaging though sometimes preachy new book, Kingsolver recounts the year her family attempted to eat only what they could grow on their farm in Virginia or buy from local sources. The book's bulk, written and read by Kingsolver in a lightly twangy voice filled with wonder and enthusiasm, proceeds through the seasons via delightful stories about the history of their farmhouse, the exhausting bounty of the zucchini harvest, turkey chicks hatching and so on. In long sections, however, she gets on a soapbox about problems with industrial food production, fast food and Americans' ignorance of food's origins, and despite her obvious passion for the issues, the reading turns didactic and loses its pace, momentum and narrative. Her daughter Camille contributes recipes, meal plans and an enjoyable personal essay in a clear if rather monotonous voice. Hopp, Kingsolver's husband and an environmental studies professor, provides dry readings of the sidebars that have him playing "Dr. Scientist," as Kingsolver notes in an illuminating interview on the last disc. Though they may skip some of the more moralizing tracks, Kingsolver's fans and foodies alike will find this a charming, sometimes inspiring account of reconnecting with the food chain. Simultaneous release with the HarperCollins hardcover (Reviews, Mar. 26). (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Living the American consumerist's good life in Arizona's desert makes abundantly obvious how everyday existence depends on nearly limitless consumption of fossil fuel. It's not just the ubiquitous automobile guzzling gas. Even more gas is consumed by trucks that must deliver most foodstuffs, since so very little of what Arizonans eat grows locally. Those plants that manage to thrive in the desert fields require irrigation through massive diversion of rivers. Despite their genuine love of life in the Southwest, the Kingsolver family moved back to reconnect with ancestral roots in Appalachia, to a farm that has been in the author's family for years. There they have at least some chance of re-creating a profounder and more intimate relationship with the foods they put on the table. Kingsolver's passionate new tome records in detail a year lived in sync with the season's ebb and flow. Starting with spring's first asparagus, summer's chickens, and the fall's surfeit of vegetables, Kingsolver's family consumes what they and their farming neighbors produce. Writing with her usual sharp eye for irony, she urges readers to follow her example and reconnect with their food's source. To that end, she provides a bibliography, Web sites, and a listing of organizations supporting sustainable agriculture. --Mark Knoblauch Copyright 2007 Booklist
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
When Kingsolver and her family moved from Arizona to southern Virginia, the family joined the locavore movement, which promotes eating only what is locally raised, grown, and produced. Both budding foodies and scientists will be engrossed in the family's endeavor. © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Library Journal Review
Best-selling novelist Kingsolver and her family moved from Tucson, AZ, to the fertile lands of Southern Appalachia, where agriculture is an accepted excuse for absence from school, to undertake an experiment of sorts. The family joined the locavore movement, which promotes eating only what is locally raised, grown, and produced. This account of their ongoing experiment is a family affair: daughter Lily morphs into a poultry entrepreneur; daughter Camille, a college student, sprinkles her own anecdotes and seasonal menus throughout; and essays by Kingsolver's husband, Hopp, an academic, warn of the high cost of chemical pesticides, fossil fuels, and processed foods environmentally, financially, and on our health. Patience is a virtue in this undertaking, which calls for eating only what is in season; however, Kingsolver's passion for food and near sensual delight in what she pulls from her garden make the enterprise seem enticing. The author's narration is homey, folksy, and warm; Camille and Hopp narrate as well. Part memoir, part how-to, and part agricultural education, this book is both timely and entertaining. With Kingsolver's broad readership; a large movement toward organic, healthful eating; and heavy media attention on the subject, expect demand. Recommended for public libraries.--Risa Getman, Hendrick Hudson Free Lib., Montrose, NY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
