Animal, Vegetable, Miracle:

A Year of Food Life

by Barbara Kingsolver
384 pp. HarperCollins, 2007 $26.95

Reviewed by Celene Carillo

“We’re a nation with an eating disorder, and we know it,” Barbara Kingsolver writes in her latest book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. Not only are our waistlines getting bigger, it takes more energy, mostly in the form of petroleum, to get factory-farmed and processed foods to our supermarket shelves than there is sustenance within them.  Not to mention that a dangerous percentage of us seem to lack an understanding of how to grow the stuff anyway – if our lives depended on when to plant the carrots, these would be dire times indeed. 

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is about how Kingsolver and her family overcame that disconnectedness from the processes and the very soil that feeds us all.  For one year, they decided, they would almost exclusively eat what they grew on their farm, or what they could buy from nearby producers.

With her typically lyrical prose, Kingsolver chronicles her family’s move from Tucson, where the best of local cuisine can at times be limited to corn and roadkill, to Southern Appalachia, where she and her family could undertake to produce more bountiful fare.  And bountiful it is.  In the height of summer the surfaces in Kingsolver’s kitchen overflow with heirloom tomatoes and zucchini.  Kingsolver and her family freeze and can their fruits and vegetables, too, and braid garlic in preparation for leaner winter harvests.  They even raise their own egg-laying hens and in a climactic wrap-up to the book, facilitate turkey sex, an act that has been almost universally replaced in the agricultural arena by artificial fowl-insemination, the result being that most turkeys don’t have the instincts to, well, do it on their own anymore.

Kingsolver’s voice is at once down-to-earth, poetic, funny, and quietly urgent.  She’s not suggesting people rise from their cubicles en masse and take up residence at the nearest organic farm, exactly.  But she is urging them to get a clue.  If we begin to understand how our current food system works, and the reasons its existence is tenuous (which Kingsolver documents well, given her background in evolutionary biology), then we won’t feel so blindsided if, or when, it falls apart.           

Although one wonders if Kingsolver’s book will resonate with people who aren’t already concerned with our food culture, or lack thereof, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle’s intimacy is hard to deny.  Readers see a family actually working their land and then coming together in the kitchen through the changing seasons. Granted, the Kingsolvers’ success owes largely to the fact they actually like hanging out with one another.  The book could also benefit from an index and more detail on how large-scale organic farms aren’t always as earth-friendly as they appear to be.    Still, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is a pleasure to read and is a reminder that knowing what we eat doesn’t have to be an obligation.  It can be a reward, too.