As anyone can plainly see from the myriad of book entries, I don’t really read a lot of non-fiction, and I read even fewer memoirs. Trust me, then, when I say that Barbara Kingsolver’s lovely and amazing Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life both surprised, delighted, and scared the crap out of me.
Kingsolver and her family (husband, two daughters) packed up their life in Arizona and moved east to Appalachia, where they owned a farm, used mainly for their summer vacations. The impetus for the move? A dedicated and inspirational move towards eating food that grew on their land and/or animals that were raised on their farm. In short, they gave up being dependent upon fossil-fuel run foodstuffs and decided to try their hand at being self-sufficient.
No stranger to farming, Kingsolver, her husband Steven L. Hopp, and her two daughters, Camille and Lily, commit to one full year of eating locally. Not just food grown from their gardens, but produce bought from local farms, meat raised and butchered by their neighbours, and making a priority to purchase anything else (like coffee) from fair trade organizations.
Seems idyllic, doesn’t it? Or even ambitious? The idea of local eating had already caught fire in my virtual world as I was eagerly awaiting The 100-Mile Diet, but as I left before the book was published, I was actually surprised to hear about Kingsolver’s own experiment at eating locally.
The memoir, which also contains seasonal eating advice from Kingsolver’s elder daughter Camille and relevant essays in each chapter by her husband Steven, is very much a family affair. The chapters, arranged chronologically from one March until the next, in addition to documenting their local food trials, each deal with a particular issue facing the world, farmers, environmentalists and anyone who might be concerned about what’ll happen to the next generation.
The main thrust of the book being that many, many people don’t know what out of season means. We have no idea that the poor cantaloupe has travelled upwards of 3,000 kilometers to land from its farm to our tables in or out of its own growing season. Many people buy bananas from the grocery store and pay no attention to the fossil fuel that’s been used to get them there. A girl I used to work with would say that was the joy of living in our modern society: being able to get pineapple whenever and where ever she might like. While it’s hard to disagree that’s true, what’s even harder is to imagine a world where we’ve used up all the gas to get the pineapple from one place to the next without ever thinking in terms of the costs beyond the ding-ding of the grocery clerk’s scanning machine.
It always feels a bit melodramatic to claim that a book has changed your life. But in this case, Kingsolver’s book brought a lot of things to light that I hadn’t maybe thought of before (how much are those bananas I’m addicted to hurting the earth?) and made me think that it’s not a bad idea to plant up a section of our backyard into an urban garden. I also signed us up for Green Earth Organics so that we can better support our local farmers, as neither of us has time to shop at a farmer’s market proper.
My favourite parts of the book involve Ms. Kingsolver helping her heritage turkeys to breed (as natural mating has been bred out of turkeys) and the adventures of using up pounds and pounds of zucchini. All in all, I would highly recommend this book as the natural companion to what’ll certainly become a media darling, The 100-Mile Diet.
I’m such a fan of Barbara Kingsolver – both her fiction and non-fiction. I’ve read both her other books of essays, and she does touch on eating locally in at least one of those essays. I’m going to have to run out and buy this now (and by “run out”, I mean “go to Amazon.co.uk”). And now I’m inspired to plant a vegetable garden!
Oh, shoot. It’s not out till May in the UK.
That’s okay — May isn’t that far away! I should have said that I was reading an advance copy from work…I’m sorry!
I really admire people who commit to eating locally; I just don’t see how it can possibly work where we live. It would doom us to a whole winter of just eating potatoes and turnips, wouldn’t it?
Actually, it would take a hell of a lot of planning. Kingsolver mentions that it’s about supporting local farmers’ markets (like the one in Dufferin Grove part) that are open year-round. A lot of them sell produce that’s been grown indoors in greenhouses, and making the most of local fruits and veggies when they’re in season by canning them (yeah, right) or freezing them (maybe more likely). It’s also about making choices at the grocery store to buy only produce that’s in season (asparagus all year round! No!) and creating eating habits around what’s available in its growing time vs. building recipes based on what you feel like.
It’s actually kind of fascinating. But there’s no way I’ll be making my own pizza crusts and cheese, as she does. I know that’s awful of me, but I’ll make a larger donation to the WWF to get some carbon credits instead. There are limits, as you say, for us urban dwellers.
It doesn’t surprise me at all that Kingsolver has written a book like this. It sounds like she was working through some of these ideas in her last novel, Prodigal Summer.
I was just telling someone recently that I believe, in ten years or so from now, local eating is going to become more viable for a lot more people. It sounds crazy, but remember how weird and niche-y organic food was 10-15 years ago? Given how scary overly centralized, mass-produced food has become, I think it’s going to make good business sense for smaller businesses to find ways to produce a greater variety of foods just outside major urban centres.
I’m so looking forward to reading The 100-Mile Diet! And now I’m adding this book to the list, too.
My RRHB also finds it to fascinating that after years of fast food production, we’re all now being told to go back to the farm. As if our ancestors (well, mine anyway) had it right all along. But we’re generations and generations of people who don’t necessarily even know how to garden. Last year we tried canning for the first time: my RRHB made grape jelly and I did some spaghetti sauce, but goodness, who knew that I was doing it all wrong?
Along with the fact that all the heritage breeds are so delicate, there’s a world of knowledge that’ll have to be re-taught, etc.
It’s all so fascinating.