Animal Vegetable Miracle (Paperback)

Barbara Kingsolver, her husband, Steven Hopp, and their two daughters, eight-year-old Lily and Camille, a student at Duke University, lived in Tucson, Arizona. They were in the midst of a prolonged drought. All the food they ate had to be imported by truck, rail , or plane. They were attached to their desert climate but were increasingly concerned about the global warming trend, and the evidence of that all around them. Steven owned a small farm in southern Appalachia, two thousand miles from Tucson, with a farmhouse, barn, orchards, and fields. The family was accustomed to spending their two months of school holidays there, and for years had spoken vaguely of moving. Now they were taking the momentous step, “the trip of our lives,” leaving Arizona with a firm commitment “to get our food from so close to home that we’d know the person who grew it.” Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is the story of their first year on the farm.
It is in large part a sermon, a call to arms for those who are concerned about the despoiling of our planet and are prepared to do something about it-namely to change their household economy to accommodate a new rule, “Save the Land.” Kingsolver avoids the preachiness that could so easily ruin the story by supplying generous helpings of wit, and by the satisfying way she has used all the members of her family as important actor-characters in the on-going narrative. She is, and has been for years, an accomplished novelist, and she well knows, in this new role as a proselytising evangelist, how to fashion her account so that it holds the reader’s interest. The book is liberally packed with facts and statistics, but they do not become overpoweringly tedious because the voice of the novelist is at all times deeply involved in the action and engagingly self-deprecating.
Also attractive are the voices of Camille, who writes short essays which, along with a fine selection of recipes and menus, close each chapter, and Steven, who writes scholarly commentary on many of the questions which arise from the text. Lily’s project, the raising of chickens from their beginning (as a mail-order delivery of a shoe-box full of cheeping balls of fluff), to the selling of their eggs, and, finally, to the introduction of a new generation, is treated as seriously as Lily herself is serious about her new tasks and responsibilities. It’s an account that is engrossing and endearing.
After devoting some months to renovating the farmhouse and making the land ready for the intense gardening that they intended to do, the family began to plant. The saga begins in the spring and the chapters that follow reflect the passage of months. “Waiting for Asparagus, Late March” starts them off, and chapter 20, “Time Begins”, is the finale with a dramatic description of the hatching of the eggs. It was the climax of Lily’s project: “Crazed and giddy, there in the dusty barn we held hands and danced. BABIES! That was all and that was enough. A nest full of little dingdongs and time begins once more.” Some months warrant several chapters: June has four, as the growth becomes more and more varied and generous. It is also in June that they get away for a ten-day driving holiday, as far north as Montreal. There they explore the city’s ethnic neighbourhoods and finally end happily at “the grand farmers’ market of Petite Italia,” where, on June 21, they find to their amazement all kinds of produce “in the recently frozen north”: asparagus, carrots, lettuce, rhubarb, hot-house tomatoes, and strawberries. Their holiday also includes a visit with small farmers Elsie and David in Ohio. They enjoy a day of helping prepare the food that they were about to eat with a friendly extended family. This is farming the way it ideally should be; this is the experience they worked to duplicate on their farm.
In September they have a real break from their own farm. They go on a trip to Italy, “their first real vacation without kids” since their honeymoon. Circling before landing, they come down over a field of black soil where an elderly farmer is ploughing with harnessed draft horses. “For reasons I didn’t really understand yet, I thought: I’ve come home.”
The following two weeks are an extended song of praise for Italian hospitality in general and cooking in particular. Steve has an Italian background: both his grandparents were born in Italy and this trip is a pilgrimage to their homeland, first to their birthplace in Abruzzi, then through the farmlands of Umbria and Tuscany, and finally by train to Venice. All along, Kingsolver describes their meals. Perhaps the most novel experience for a North American reader is the discovery of “Agritourismo”. It is similar to Bed and Breakfast accommodation, with the addition of lunch and dinner served informally at a long wooden table adjacent to the kitchen. The host family usually joins the guests and the fare is always home-cooked and home-produced: “By law, this type of accommodation must be run by farmers whose principal income derives from farming rather than tourism.” Barbara and Steve meet resident Italians who are enjoying a break from their busy town and city lives and rejoicing in the local cuisine rather than tourists like themselves. The couple are also willing students wherever they visit, learning a good deal to take home to their own farm. Olive culture, which of course is not part of their Appalachian land, is a fascinating new subject, and at every stop they are treated to their hosts’ experiences and their hosts’ firm faith in the superior quality of their own olive oil.
They return in October to our version of fall folk-art decorations and Hallowe’en celebrations with a new appreciation for their lavish variety. We are bound to feel more than a hint of the usual Canadian reaction of combined annoyance and amusement at Kingsolver’s description of the Montreal market as the “recently frozen north.” For the most part, however, we can share Kingsolver’s garden experiences completely, month by month. There is no small gardener who hasn’t felt victimised by the proliferating zucchini, and we all know the sensation of “Living in a Red State” that the tomato season brings with its overwhelming largesse. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle can be read as a self-help encyclopaedia on every aspect of gardening and on the possibility of a single family’s contribution to the greening of the planet. It can also be read simply as a many-faceted volume of adventures in food. In either case the book is fine and valuable entertainment.
Clara Thomas (Books in Canada)
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Starred Review. [Signature]Reviewed by Nina PlanckMichael 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).
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.