By Barbara Kingsolver with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver

HarperCollins 2007

Growing, Cooking and Eating as a Family Project

In a possible case of preaching to the choir, Barbara Kingsolver’s book on her family’s experience of eating food from their own garden and immediate area for a year may happily push some over the edge into full vegetable conversion. Readers who enjoy Kingsolver’s essays and novels might already be environmentally oriented (often a theme in her writing) and fans of organic food. This reviewer was compelled into whipping up more fresh meals with local vegetables thanks to this book, with only occasional pizza joint visits.

Kingsolver, her husband, and two daughters decide to move to a Virginia farm from Tucson, Arizona, which, she writes, “might as well be a space station where human sustenance is concerned. Virtually every unit of food consumed there moves into town in a refrigerated module from somewhere far away.” After the move to southern Appalachia, they commit themselves to raising as much of their food as they can and eating foods in season along with what is canned, frozen, or dried from their harvest.

The warning, for those who already love to shop at local farmers’ markets and local fish and meat providers, is that after reading this book, you will only want to buy more from local farms, bakeries and roadside stands.

And as for shopping at supermarkets, some may not want to eat those hockey-puck-hard fruits and vegetables shipped with a hefty carbon footprint anymore. “Citizens of frosty worlds unite, and think about marching past the off-season fruits,” she writes. “You have nothing to lose but mealy, juiceless, rock-hard and refusing to open.”

This book is a terrific blend of narrative (Kingsolver is a master of metaphor with plenty of wit) and science and food economics sidebars contributed by biologist husband Steven Hopp. It’s also spiced with cooking advice and recipes by 19-year-old daughter Camille, who is way cool and awfully smart. Nine-year-old Lily is their official chicken meister, who develops an impressive egg business. This was a family project. Sure, they had school and jobs to hold down too, but they grew, cooked, and ate together, often with neighbors and friends.

Kingsolver teeters on the line of almost preaching, but she’s a damn good food and farming evangelist. Not many writers can make four pages on asparagus so interesting. Kingsolver’s family learns to both raise and harvest their heirloom breed chickens and turkeys. For those of us who still buy meat wrapped in plastic, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle might at least convince us to buy from natural-feed, small producers rather than from factory farms (which you don’t want to know too much about).

Even though there is a big disconnect in U.S. culture to our food’s origins, she says it is possible to be more aware of where our food is from. Something runs counterintuitive for New Englanders, for instance, to be buying fish from Chile or a Chinese ship in Alaskan waters (yes, I saw such a label at my supermarket). A terrific vignette is when Kingsolver reports to a city friend that their potatoes were up. “Wait a minute,” the friend said. “What part of a potato comes up?” “Um, the plant part,” Kingsolver replied. “Wow,” she said. “I never knew a potato had a plant part.”

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle raises the issue of the true cost of jetting foods — contributing to increased carbon emissions — to our dinner tables. Do we really need kiwi fruits to adorn our plates in the northern hemisphere and consume strawberries with no taste 11 months a year? “Our jet-age dependence on petroleum to feed our faces is a limited-time-only proposition,” she writes.

A lot of us may not be able to grow our food or even want to, Kingsolver says, but most communities now have farmer’s markets in non-frigid months and lots of places have roadside stands. Kingsolver and Hopp offer readers a practical list of small changes we can make to help sustain local farms and, in turn, local economies.

There is a bias, Kingsolver notes, in thinking that caring about organic or local food is elitist. Growing and buying local food is a way of living that most human beings have lived through the centuries. “It’s a strategy that will keep grocery money in the neighborhood where it gets recycled into your own school system and local businesses,” she writes. “The green spaces around your town stay green, and farmers who live nearby get to grow more food next year, for you.” Amen. q

A resident of Connecticut when she isn’t in Maine, Linda Beyus is a frequent contributor to Working Waterfront.