Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

      Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is her first nonfiction book. It documents her family’s attempt to spend a year living off of food grown on their farm, or by their neighbors. Barbara left Tucson, Arizona with her husband Steven, her college sophomore daughter Camille and her third grade daughter Lily. They set out for their summer farm in Virginia with a plan to leave grocery stores behind from April to April. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. Barbara Kingsolver is a wonderful writer who really opened my eyes to the truth about the American food industry and food culture. She made the point of how simply growing a few vegetables in a garden or buying local meat and dairy could improve the health of our bodies and our planet. This book has inspired me to learn where my food really comes from, because even organic food may have to fly thousands of miles to get to where I buy it.

      "[We were] heading for the Promised Land where water falls from the sky and green stuff grows all around. We were about to begin to adventure of realigning our lives with our food chain." (Kingsolver, 6) This book is about one family’s small farm of vegetables, fruit and poultry, but through their story one learns of the story of many organic farmers, the struggles they face and their triumphs. The book forced me to accept the reality that I can’t really feel good about my food until I know its true story, and that vitamin pills will certainly not solve the problems of the nutrition lost in the long processed journey of much of the grocery store food. Barbara Kingsolver is very passionate about vegetables and made me forget that it was winter and want to march right outside and plant some potatoes and asparagus. By reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle I was given a greater appreciation for vegetables and the process of growing them. This book wasn’t just a feel good book about how fun gardening was, it was a book that was filled with facts about the treatment of the living food we eat, from pesticides and herbicides to Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations. The book was also helpful in showing how we can move away from these things by visiting farmers markets and learning how to check what free-range really means. It is possible to have twenty-thousand chickens in one room with a door leading to a four-by-four outdoor chicken coop and call it free-range because the chickens have the chance to go outside even when the door remains closed. This book was very informational on practices like this and how to avoid them simply by buying local meet and checking on food sources. Another thing that I became aware of by reading the book was just how little diversity there is in the food consumed by Americans, with genetically engineered corn and soybeans taking the crown as the farming monsters of the country with six other plant species making up some astonishing percentage of the food we consume. Steven L. Hopp, the husband of Barbara Kingsolver, wrote a page long informational piece for about each chapter of the book. He introduced me to some wild numbers about oil used in food processing and transport and the fact that 99% of the turkey consumed in the United States is one genetically modified species that would die if ever let loose because of its inability to hold itself up on weak legs. These informational blurbs added a lot to the book and the experience of reading it, often adding an opportunity to bring up a story or legal case that may be very important but otherwise would not fit into the style of the book.

        Barbara Kingsolver’s daughter Camille Kingsolver also added another dimension to the book. She wrote essays about the farm life from the perspective of a college sophomore and also vegetable lover. It was nice to read from this perspective, to take a break at the end of each chapter to read the story of a dinner party or of the lovely life of an asparagus plant. I enjoyed hearing from someone young with stories to tell that I could relate to easily. Camille’s essays were also humorous and light, not focusing on the big problems of the food industry but more on life with the pleasures of growing food. After each of Camille’s essays she gives the reader two or three recipes using the seasonal foods available for each month. Often these recipes are the same ones discussed by Barbara Kingsolver in the previous chapter. To go with the recipes is a weekly meal plan to use foods that would be popping up in the garden or falling from the trees in the month of the chapter. The meal plans always include pizza from scratch on Fridays and a clever way to use leftovers new ways.

       The strong points in this book as with thousands of other books are too many to mention, and I couldn’t just pick one of the strongest points, but I guess to name a few. I would say that in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Barbara Kingsolver does a very good job of saying, "this is the problem, and here is what others are doing to fix it, you can do it too!" The book is also a very good mix of story telling and information reflection. It is easy to relate to Barbara personally as well as feel for her farm, and relate to all of the other farmers that arise in the book who have real names and real families. Although it is a book full of facts that are difficult to face the book left me feeling inspired and uplifted, and has me telling everyone that they should read it. I really think that Animal, Vegetable, Miracle must have a similar effect on all who read it, it just makes you feel the need for good food!

One thing about the book that confused me a little was Barbara Kingsolver’s tendency to discuss new things every paragraph of a chapter, so one chapter wasn’t specifically about one thing, she would name a chapter after zucchini and then talk about cows for five pages before writing one paragraph about zucchinis and moving onto tomatoes. I got used to this fairly quickly, and it didn’t really bother me, it just confused me. Also this way of writing was helpful sometimes because she could mix true stories from the present and past, while adding facts, this made the book interesting to read, which can be difficult in a lot of nonfiction writing. I had wanted to read this book anyway, before being given a biology related book as an assignment. To me the assignment was writing about the book, the assignment really just motivated me to read the book now, instead of putting it off for another few weeks.

         Animal, Vegetable, Miracle definitely changed my outlook on the world, I have a much clearer view of food in the United States, I understand a lot more why unnatural growing processes are unhealthy, not just that they are. I have greater appreciation for vegetables and gardening. All of the astonishing numbers in the book have helped me to be able to grasp the amount of gas used for food transport and the amount of petroleum used for packaging. I was able to see how buying local food could boost the local economy. I was awoken to the huge diversity of plants hearing of at least 12 different types of potatoes, and even more tomatoes, and that’s just in one small farming community in Virginia. As a book to learn a great deal from I am sure that I will reread Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Barbara Kingsolver has written another wonderful book with a voice of truth, the truth food culture of America, instead of just another book about everything that’s wrong, she helps to refresh the mind with what everyone can do to help.