Book Review: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

I first read Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle a few years ago, but I think of it every spring when I plant my vegetable garden. It was a quick read that I really enjoyed, and all the rain this spring has given me extra time to think about Kingsolver's story. Her familiy decides to uproot and move to a farm, learning to grow and produce much of their own food and eat locally for a year.

I knew that this book spoke to me when Kingsolver wrote:

It is not my intention here to lionize country wisdom over city ambition.  I only submit that the children of farmers are likely to know where food comes from, and that the rest of us might do well to pay attention. 

Any time someone makes a comment that country kids are intelligent, I’m listening. I have been shocked to realize just how separated the majority of my peers are from their food. Some people are bothered by the fact that we have eaten chickens, turkeys or pigs that we raised. They can’t believe that I would eat an animal that was my pet. My response has always been: “I grew up on a farm. My life is different from yours.” Not to mention that if I have helped to raise an animal, I know what his life was like, that he was loved and well cared for and was a happy animal. There are none of those guarantees when we go to the grocery store and buy a hamburger, and in fact, cows living happy lives are more the exception than the rule. As a society, we've become more and more disconnected from our food.

In two generations we’ve transformed ourselves from a rural to an urban nation.  North American children begin their school year around Labor Day and finish at the beginning of June with no idea that this arrangement was devised to free up children’s labor when it was needed on the farm. 

It's time to regain some of that lost wisdom. The Kingsolver clan lives out a year on their farm growing all of the food that they possibly can, and buying very little, mostly from other local farmers. I enjoyed reading Barbara’s description of day to day life, husband Steven Hopp’s interjections of articles about society or science, and elder daughter Camille’s recipes. It was also wonderful to hear about how younger daughter Lilly was involved in her own adventure in math, business and science education raising laying hens. It is clear that farming for the Kingsolvers was a family affair, as it is for all farming families. When a family lives that way, children are able to feel that they are contributing to the success of the family, and they also learn all of those little lessons that are not taught in school. My dad always said that you could learn more in a day on the farm than you could in a week in school.

Farming is not for everybody; increasingly, it’s hardly for anybody. Over the last decade our country has lost an average of 300 farms a week. Large or small, each of those was the life’s work of a real person or family, people who built their lives around a promise and watched it break. The loss of a farm is a darkness leading to some of life’s bitterest ends. Keeping one, on the other hand, may mean also working in a factory at the end of a long daily drive, behind and ahead of the everyday work of farming.

It's important for us, from an economic and environmental perspective, to learn how to produce our own food, but it's also key to support local farmers. I loved this book because it made me think so much of my own family, but I could also see how it could be educational for someone who did not grow up the way that I did. The successes, trials and tribulations are a wonderful documentation of local food lifestyle. The stories of long days in the fields, a kitchen full of zucchini, slaughter of hens and of hard work shared by a family are sadly not stories that many people would relate to anymore. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn more about the importance of eating seasonally and locally, and wants to hear about one family’s experience getting back in touch with their food.