Book Review: Animal, Vegetable Miracle

I just finished Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver)  in preparation of a book club meeting.

The book details Kingsolver’s family’s move to their family farm, where they endeavor to live for one full year eating only food that is grown or raised locally. This is accomplished through visiting farmer’s markets, gardening, and raising animals of their own for eggs and meat. Although they make a few exceptions (coffee, the odd jar of supermarket capers, stuff like that), the family succeeds in their challenge. No one starves; in fact, they eat pretty well most months. Season by season, the reader follows the family’s work and rewards.

The experiment begins in April, which offers of lots of greens, asparagus, and rhubarb: lovely foods all, but not the variety we’ve come to expect. It’s difficult to imagine, for most of us, what this kind of limitation would be like. Soon, however, summer brings more fresh fruits and vegetables than they can eat, and the house is thrown into cooking and preserving the overflow. Along with the autumn produce, Kingsolver and family harvest home-raised chickens and turkeys.

Oh, I have to give a shout out to those turkeys! I have never found myself thinking so much about a turkey’s sex life as I have in the last week. It seems that those breast-heavy breeds of turkey used by Butterball et al that we’ve come to associate with holiday cheer here in the U.S. have not had proper relations for generations. Rather, they have to submit to some bizarre human-led (try not to imagine it) exercise in indignity to fertilize the eggs and ensure more Thanksgiving birds for everyone. And they can’t even walk correctly because they’re tipped over by their own white meat. Poor idiot sexually frustrated beasts.

Anyway, the seasons. By winter, the farm work is mostly done, with pantry and freezer full of the results; by the end of the season, though, shelves start to become light, and it’s time to start planning for the cycle to begin again.

The family not only survives, but finds that they have enjoyed the challenge. And I don’t want to spoil the book for you, but let’s just say that there are some turkeys on the farm who, ahem, enjoy the challenge as well.

It was difficult for me to get into the mindset of being limited by the seasonal of a given region, which is kind of the point, I’m sure. There really is a lot that we take for granted, now that practically any food we want is available at the supermarket year round. That they did it, and did it while still liking each other, is heartening.

I find Kingsolver’s stories about the farm very interesting–as long as she sticks to the memoir style. The running of the farm, the family relationships, the travels to other parts of the country and world, these are richly detailed and compelling. However, there are a lot of tangents that I find (here it is) preachy and smug. At first, I tried to slog through these portions but eventually decided it was OK to skim them and move on to the (organic grass-fed) meat of the book.

In addition to the main text, Camille Kingsolver, Barbara’s then-19-year-old daughter, provides a younger person’s perspective on food and family, along with some of the recipes that sustained them. Barbara’s husband, Steven Hopp, provides sidebars on topics that I couldn’t begin to identify, because they bored me. I’m sure he’s a wonderful, interesting person, but he was given the topics I just wasn’t interested in.

On the whole, I recommend this book. It’s a timely topic and a fascinating challenge, to eat where you are and be mindful of your habits’ effect on the earth; the first step in improving those habits is to have them brought to light.

And if there happens to be a little additional gobble-gobble on the side, well that’s just gravy. So to speak.

Tags: Animal Vegetable Miracle, Barbara Kingsolver, Book Club with Mormons, Book review