Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

He prefers raw vegetables, whole, and procured himself from crisper drawer or field. For example, when Jeremy pulled up some overmature salad turnips for Timmy to feed the calves – the calves turned up their little bovine noses, but Timmy took a look and started munching both root and leaf. This gives me courage to keep cheerfully offering fresh vegetables to our young sons, who are usually skeptical but are enthusiastic when they give the veggies a chance. Camille (their teenage daughter) contributes delightful, youthful notes and recipes. I initially read these with trepidation, expecting dreary finger-wagging, but instead found these little essays honest, well-stated arguments, and always with hope of a better way.

Kingsolver’s husband, Steven Hopp (an environmental studies professor) provides succinct sidebars on many big problems in agriculture and food systems. She gets on the soapbox just enough to prickle your conscience a healthy bit. Discussion of the big issues (energy imbalance of current food systems, the American obesity epidemic, the ethics of eating) flows naturally from and among the joyous and engaging recounting of the family’s local year. This type of project is catching on, but it is a joy to read her version. The book documents a year in which her family embarks on a project to eat only what they can grow or purchase locally. Barbara Kingsolver has a big heart, and I believe will embrace and inspire many. Those rather large personal biases stated, this is a book that I believe should appeal to and be a good read for many.

So in a way for me, it was like reading an alternative reality of my life, written really really well.

Also, I have a lot in common with Kingsolver (though sadly, not the skill at writing!): we’re both moms, biologists, try to transform anxiety about the future of the world into joyful action, and have the same attitude toward cooking and eating. This book is very personal – as eating necessarily is – and coming from a writer I admire so well, I found this really interesting. with her gracious, funny and insightful writing. I recognize that some of my enthusiasm was fueled by my long-time adoration of this author (tousling with Jeremy over whose turn it was to read “Pigs in Heaven”, giving a somewhat dog-eared copy of “The Poisonwood Bible” to Jeremy’s parents while they were volunteer teaching for a year in Ethiopia).

I stayed up past bedtime reading this one, for sure. To me, the best of the bunch is “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” by Barbara Kingsolver (with Steven Hopp and Camille Kingsolver, Harper Collins, 2007).

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver