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Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
by Barbara Kingsolver, Steven L. Hopp, and Camille Kingsolver
2007, 370 pages, $26.95, hardcover, HarperCollins Publishers
A recent hint column advised readers to step outside their homes to check the weather so as to know what to wear that day. I howled with laughter to think that anyone needed Heloise to tell them something so obvious. In hindsight, however, I despair that so many Americans are that isolated from their environment.
It’s not only the weather. Americans have little intimacy with their food, other than stuffing it into their mouths.
Kingsolver and her family turn the spotlight on our national food disorder and show us the dangers of our eating habits and what we are missing by eating the way we do. They resolved to spend a year eating only locally-produced foods, including food they grew themselves. Because their desert Tucson home and community could not sustain this lifestyle, they sold it and settled into their old Kentucky farmstead and began gardening, raising livestock, and haunting local farmers’ markets.
With a friendly, often amusing voice, Kingsolver writes about the joys of asparagus and the woes of zucchiniphobia. She talks realistically about eating meat and butchering the animals that grace their table - yes, blood and death is involved! Her daughter, Camille, offers her young-adult perspective and recipes. Her husband, Steven Hopp, researched and wrote sections about our absurd and disastrous food industry.
For much of my young adulthood I lived primitively and in financial poverty, but a good portion of our meals came from our own land and labors. I've slipped into the syrupy consumer lifestyle, but this book encourages me to return to one more rewarding and sustaining.
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