Customer Reviews

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle - A Year Of Food Life

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Three hundred and sixty-eight pages, no pretty pictures, and it's about food? Yes it is, and it's fascinating. Written by best-selling novelist Barbara Kingsolver, her scientist hubby and teenage daughter, "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" chronicles 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. There are touching human stories here (the family's 9-year-old learns a secret to raising chickens for food: don't name them!) but the book's purpose is serious food for thought: it argues the economic, social and health benefits of putting local foods at the center of a family diet. As Kingsolver details the family's experience month-by-month, husband Steven adds sidebars on the problems of industrial agriculture and daughter Camille tosses in some first-person essays ("Growing Up in the Kitchen") and recipes ("Holiday Corn Pudding a Nine-Year-Old Can Make").

And it is all so well written! Kingsolver can veer way off topic -- wandering off into subjects like rural politics, even turkey sex -- and still, somehow, stay right on point. Her husband can say more in two pages than some professors I know can say in 200, and the daughter's writings... well I often couldn't tell who was writing what without checking for the byline.

The book looks and feels great, too. The dust jacket has been pressed into the nubby texture of burlap. The pages have ragged edges, which makes them soft on your fingers.

Reading this book, drinking my Phosphoric Acid Diet Coke and snacking on some Partially Hydrogenated Palm Kernel Oil Walt Disney World Hungry Heroes Yogurt Pretzels, I suddenly felt like I was a kid again, sitting in my bedroom in 1969 listening to that Joni Mitchell "Woodstock" lyric: "Time to get back to the land, and set my soul free." Now that song is stuck back in my head! Maybe it should have never left.

I work in large-scale, corporate agriculture. Over the years I have worked for chemical companies, seed companies, grower-shippers and allied industries. I have recommended Kingsolver's novel "The Poisonwood Bible" to many of my colleagues. I have also endorsed Pollan's "Ominovore's Dilemma", having bought several copies and distributed them around. I very much enjoyed Kingsolver's "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life". It contained all the wit and humor I would expect from one of this nation's finest novelists. I think this book as well as Pollan's are a bit weak in the plant science area and I think both lack some of the insights into the machinations that really drive some of the food production industries. Then, again their intended audience is not the readers of TAG: Theoretical and the Applied Genetics, it is the populace at large. I very much agree with the sentiment of eating local, of shopping local, and of the slow food movement. It puts money back into the local community, it fosters a sense of community and it improves the quality of our diets. What is local though? Many of the fruits and vegetables eaten during Kingsolver's year of eating locally do not have Virginia as their center of origin. Some purists might cry foul. But, I think the focus needs to be on breaking the transport chain. People need to rediscover what a fresh peach or tomato is supposed to taste like, and their proper season. The bulk of the 'civilized' world buy their food at a chain grocery store dominated by one of the multinational grocery conglomerates. You think you have a choice when you walk into the store? You do not. That choice was made by a buyer probably at some regional DC (distribution center) who purchased the fruit from a packing shed sight unseen, and certainly did not taste it. And, their main concern was not taste, it was making sure the fruit had a minimum level of sugar, since it is picked under ripe, and that it was firm enough to withstand many hundreds of miles in a truck. It is too bad, because I know the farmers want to produce a high quality product. And, I know the shippers want to ship fruits and vegetables that taste good. But they must bow to the buyers and market forces. In the California cherry industry, about half the fruit is exported each year, but it accounts for well over half the revenue because it is a 'high value' market. By my recent calculations, it takes 7.75 calories of fuel for every calorie of cherries flown from SFO to Tokyo. That is just the flight, it does not include any other production or transportation energy costs. Does that sound like sustainable agriculture? Do you really need those Chilean cherries or that asparagus from Peru in December?

I love Barbara Kingsolver's books and was thrilled to hear she had another on the market. Her family leaves Arizona and moved back to Virginia to spend a year living off what they can grow or buy at the local farmer's market? Good deal!

And I certainly did enjoy parts of the book, prticularly the actual discussing the dilemmas of eating locally and how the family got around them. Kingsolver is a wonderful writer, and her talk about vegetables, mushrooms and chickens is far more entertaining than it should by rights be. The recipes that are included sound nice and I plan to try some of them. But the rest of the book I found preachy to the point where it became annoying. I get the point: shop locally, shop at the local farmer's market. I get it, I get it. I'll even do it. I don't need all those extra pages pounding it in.

And I wasn't so impressed with her defense of the tobacco industry, saying it provided a living for a lot of families. Fair enough, but it's sideways logic -- trucking in the strawberries she objects to provides a living wage for truckers and their families too.

It is possible to live off the land. The Kingsolver family are proof of that. They grew their own food for a year on a farm in Virginia's Applachian mountains. It only cost 50 cents a meal to feed the Kingsolver family of four for a year, and I found that to be amazing. It is much healthier to eat organic foods which are foods produced without chemicals. This is one of the main ideas of this insightful book. I love Camille's Kingsolver's contributions in this book. She is the college age daughter of the primary author. Camille's reflections about food are thoughtful, and her recipes sound delicious. I loved her essay about how she learned to love asparagus. I learned that asparagus is an excellent source of vitamin C, which I did not know before. There is a recipe in here for an asparagus mushroom bread pudding. I never thought of putting these ingredients together. Another interesting recipe in the book is one for zucchini chocolate chip cookies. The recipe sounds so unusual, I am tempted to try it. The recipe for pumpkin soup and sweet potato quesadillas sound yummy too. Everyone in the Kingsolver family contributed in this local food project. Barbara raised and bred turkeys, while her nine year old daughter raised her own chickens and provided the family with eggs for a year. They even made their own cheese.

I also enjoyed the contributions of Steven L. Hopp in this book. He is a professor who teaches environmental science at Emory and Henry College. His short contributions in the every chapter are very insightful. He really compliments the main text written by Kingsolver. I enjoyed reading his thoughts about the popularity of agricultural education in public schools. This is a fascinating and informative book about food.

Look what happened when the nation turned its attention to the tobacco industry. If only that would happen with the fast food/processed food industry. One can only dream.....

Thank you so much, Barbara Kingsolver, for grabbing that attention and making it the focus of your new book. I loved it. It was so well written.

I hope this subject really catches the attention of more and more people. For our familys conversion to organic and local, mindful eating it started with the movie, "Supersize Me," and went on to "Fast Food Nation, etc."

Ms. Kingsolver points out in her book it is a slow process to weed yourself off that junk food.

Ms. Kingsolver opens up the doors to her farm and family life to share how we can save our lives (literally) and the world by eating local, fresh and home grown. Put down that twinkie and pop! Pick up a hoe and educate yourself on the dangers of fast food and processed food!

Blue jello? Come on! What part of that is natural, real food? But I dare you to eat a Christmas colored bean, like the one on the book cover.

Ms. Kingsolver also shares about how rare it is to see/find true animal breeding in the modern world. She states in the book it was impossible to find modern resources and had to look to the past to find the answers.

Nature has been bred out of the animals we eat. And she writes about it so eloquently!

Sorry this review is all over the place! I was so excited to see Ms. Kingsolvers new book out; and it is on a subject that is near and dear to my heart. The narrative is incredibly well written. It is very inspiring.

This is certainly a book that makes one take a careful look at one's eating practices. Kingsolver presents a compelling case for trying as much as possible to buy food that is locally and/or organically grown. The tone of the book can be a bit preachy. This could be rather irritating at a certain point. I often found myself talking back to her: sure, it's easy IF you live on a farm in a farming area that doesn't have long bitter winters, and you're a wealthy best-selling author with plenty of time to spend planting, weeding, harvesting and preserving. (I also lost her when she went on about the lovely lifestyle afforded by tobacco farming, mourned its becoming less profitable, and defended the practice because the farmers aren't making cigarettes; it's big corporations.) Still, we can all adapt some of her recommendations into our lives. The book tells us why we should and gives suggestions on how to do it. The stories of her family's adventures in food production are engaging. I'm nearly finished with the book, and I think it'll feel like a fascinating neighbor moved away when I'm done.

Kingsolver is a brilliant writer, and I count her among my favorite authors. I just finished "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle," and while Kingsolver's unique voice shines through, I found her latest book to be lackluster. She limits the scope of her work to praising her garden and her family. Reading this book I was reminded of Marie Antoinette's dairy at Versailles, in which she dressed up as a milkmaid to imitate Rousseau's "back to nature" philosophy. Kingsolver and her family "play farmer" for a year, but how would this be possible for anyone who works full time outside of the home?

Hopp's sidebars superficially discuss the agricultural industry, but frankly, he does not go into sufficient detail and they are not well integrated into the rest of the text. Kingsolver's daughter's contributions to the book echo her mother's words. However, I tested out a few of the recipes and was happily surprised. The authors do not provide meaningful advice for readers who do not want to live in Appalachia on how to promote sustainable eating, other than the constant mantra "shop at farmers' markets."

If you want to read a good book on this topic, skip "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle," and pick up a copy of Michael Pollan's "Omnivore's Dilemma."

(This is written after listening to most of the book on CD.) I found this book to be a real mixed bag. On the one hand it was inspirational (e.g., while mid-CD I made Swiss chard for the first time--oops, it wasn't in season locally, though!-- joined a meat CSA, and committed to buying more organic vegetables than ever). At the same time, I found it maddeningly self-important and sanctimonious, even though I had the distinct impression that Kingsolver's intentions were to be anything but. It is thoughtful and full of useful information, but by now I've heard more than I care to about this oh-so-special family who does special things like farm, can, bake daily bread, and make cheese, and eat only the most wholesome meals together, all of which render them a lot more holy and intimate than folks who don't. OK, I get the point-- enough!

I liked this book a lot. Kingsolver (and clan) are great writers, and the project they describe is inspiring and worthwhile. The part about turkey breeding alone was worth $25.

I'm a little astonished by the reviewers who found the book not preachy; the one thing I found off-putting was the smugness of it all. The barbs against urban people grated on my nerves. I live in a town (Portland, OR) that practically has a farmer's market in every neighborhood. You can find one every day of the week, and they're well attended. People here care deeply about food, and how and where it's grown, and supporting farmers. I know many people in NYC who feel the same way. I grew up on a farm, and I've lived in several regions of the U.S., and no place has a lock on ecological purity. Country folk eat Cheetos, too. (And Frito pie!) And refusing a teenage houseguest a banana? That made me shudder.

It helps to read this as a book about food, not about people. The family life depicted here, apart from Lily and the chicken-horse problem, is a little spooky. The Little House books reveal more character and human conflict. Was there no one who ever woke up cursing the heat, the snakes, the bugs? A child who rebelled against all that weeding? A moment of homesickness for Tuscon? You don't learn a lot about the people here, except that they work hard and eat very, very well. Don't expect a Barbara Kingsolver novel, just an inspiring food diary spanning a year.

Wonderful, insightful book about the importance of eating locally, and even more importantly, eating thoughtfully. Barbara Kingsolver details the year in which she and her family strive to live off of foods grown locally, but the book is much more than an interesting personal memoir; she, her husband and their daughter explain in great detail WHY they feel the need to do this.

There is no vague talk or philosophy here, rather very thorough forays into biology, politics, history, education, and every other genre of study that explains how we, as Americans, eat-- which is generally pretty badly. The scientific background of both Ms. Kingsolver and her husband (who has essays scattered throughout the book) really shines through. The decision to eat locally (in this case, from their own garden or farms within the same county) is presented not as a throw-back to a better, earlier time but as the way forward, the beginning of a new and improved chapter. Instead of presenting this painstakingly-researched information in one overwhelming block, Ms. Kingsolver carefully intersperses it with the personal story in easily-digested bites. This keeps both the science and the garden-family-diary part in balance and makes the book very readable.

The personal side of the story is excellent. Growing vegatables; raising poultry; making cheese at home(!!!); baking bread every day (the husband's responsibility in this case); canning, freezing, braiding, and otherwise storing the garden's bounty; each of these and more are a part of the grand experiment. "Deprivation" never sounded so fun or so fufilling. If you've ever dreamed of canning your own tomatoes or keeping chickens, this book will make your yearnings worse.

Ms. Kingsolver and co. are refreshingly non-vegetarian, blithely describing Turkey-Harvest Day (what it sounds like, yes) and explaining both why "vegetarian" crops like corn kill more animals via thresher and pesticide than meaty "crops" like chicken, and why the idea that the world would be better off with more vegetarians is deeply flawed. Vegetarians may be perturbed by their findings, but I think it would still be worth reading with an open mind.

The glimpses into her family life, too, are fascinating-- kids who are more interested in chickens and tomatoes than Playstation and cable? Huh. The book includes several essays by Kingsolver's elder daughter, Camille, who provides an interesting perspective: as both an interested member in this "new" lifestyle and a college freshman, she is a bridge between these cultures.

Like any garden/farm narrative, I suppose, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is very regional and it really captures the flavor of its paticular locale--Virginia. I am a recent transplant to Virginia myself (this is my first spring/summer here) and the book answered some of my questions about this new place, like "Why does my front yard smell like onions? Are those chives growing wild all around the neighborhood?" Apparently they are "ramps". Who knew? Not this Texan. That sudden retreat to freezing last month is a "dogwood winter". I realize that to most readers of this review it's not important, but I felt a sudden thrill of recognition to realize that this farm and author are probably within a hundred miles from here-- to realize that she is describing my newly adopted environment.

My only bone to pick is a very small one. Near the end of the book, Ms Kingsolver expresses surprise that her pet topic of eating locally has suddenly mushroomed from a secret underground movement, to the mainstream. As far as I can tell, this isn't true. Yes, the Times (or whatever it was) has a cover story on eating locally. But I was learning about it back in college (2001-ish) at the University of Vermont. My environmental classes covered the costs of shipping tomatoes and included a trip to the local CSA. That CSA, as well as the one I've joined here in VA, have been around for a while-- at least 5-10 years I think. Ms Kingsolver mentions several upscale restaurants (and one diner) that serve only local foods, and cookbooks. So clearly, this trend/idea/philosophy has been gaining steam for at least a decade, and didn't just pop out of the ground as the book was going to the publisher. But, as I said, small quibble. The book is fantastic, I'd reccommend it to anyone interested in changing the way they eat, gardening, farming, chickens...