Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

I had no idea a book about eating locally could be so polarizing! I personally loved this book, and as someone who is actively trying to eat locally and who has dreams of homesteading, I found it informative, funny, and relatable. Kingsolver writes so beautifully, and I loved Camille's inserts as well.

The author takes us on a journey with her family as they try something different, and attempt to eat only what they raise or grown on their own property, or can get local.
This isn't a new concept, but for someone from a more urban, or suburban area, it may be hard to realize. I live on a homestead, and there are many around me who already do more at HOME in STEAD of buying at the store. This includes the food we eat, how we prepare our food, the clothes we wear, and more.
This book definitely gets four stars for the possibility of helping at least a handful of people understand the benefits of this lifestyle.
But I took one star away, because there were some things the author states that I felt were more of a personal choice, and she made some of it sound like medical or health guideline. But my health is also personal to me, and I will make my own choices based on my own studies and what works best for me.

Even the few pages I read were a slog. From the beginning, Kingsolver preaches things that I somewhat agree with. However, planting and harvesting my own food would be impossible in my yard and in Chicago winters. Farming your own food isn't necessarily the best option, as Kingsolver states. Anyway, I felt a sense of relief when I dropped this book back off at the library today!

Too extreme for me and not written in a clear narrative style.

Excellent book, but not without caveats. After reading The Poisonwood Bible (a Kingsolver novel) the writing here was not nearly as good. But then again, it's hard to top, or even match that poem of a novel. So... the writing. That's really the only criticism, the meat of the book, is brilliant.

In Animal, Vegetable, Miracle Kingsolver endeavers to eat for one solid year as close to the Earth as possible. She and her husband own a small farm. Additionally, they could supplement their diet locally for some other food items. And they allowed an extremely limited number of shipped items (coffee, spices, olive oil, and a couple other things).

This was an experiment. The book illustrates her family's experiences, the mistakes they make, and more. It also serves to point out what is possible. She acknowledges that many folks can't grow their own food, but most can certainly eat more sustainably. And she makes a plea to eat “just one meal” a week on nothing but stuff grown nearby.

Vegans won't like this book. She casually brushes aside their arguments pretty handily.

Folks that eat “whatever they find in the supermarket” may feel defensive (you see it throughout the reviews of this book). The book is intended to enlighten and inspire, but it seems to do the opposite with some. With some the book invokes defensive reactions.

Does it come across as self-important, self-congratulatory, self-satisfying? I would say “prideful” is the right word. She did something really hard, especially in an age where many of the skills necessary have atrophied or even disappeared. Her commentary on turkey breeding was especially telling. She prevailed. Pretty impressively. As I read the book I kept thinking, “just wait until the hard months, Jan, Feb, Mar”. She talks about this and beginning to run short of food. To many folks, I am sure this one section alone would be eye opening.

In the end, this is a book about process and what is possible. And a book about sustainability. The plea is to reduce our carbon footprint on the world. And to simply be... no so wasteful. The biggest impact all people can make is simply eating closer to home. For most this is possible, for others (her example is living in Arizona) the only solution is to move.

Preachy? Well, it's a book endorsing an idea... yeah, it will be a tad preachy. It's a sermon, that's what one should expect.

But it is a good sermon. A very achievable sermon. A plea to be more like Tuscany and less like... Arizona (and the rest of the USA). If folks would take this book to heart we'd really begin to tap into our local uniqueness (terrior), but more importaly, reduce our energy dependence and simply make the world a better place.

This book came into my hand at a time when I was thinking gardening and farmers markets and “what is so great about organic, anyway?” - that is to say, at a time when I was very receptive to the book's message. Fortunately Nick picked up this book (while I was in the middle of it, oh well), which opened his eyes to food issues as well. In fact, some of our best conversations about how we want to actually live in this world started out as conversations about this book. So what I got out of this book was a new resolve to pay attention to seasonality in my fruits and veggies; a willingness to buy the more expensive local and organic foods, because that is not an area of life to be chintzy about; and new adventures in cooking, making food, and gardening on a teeny tiny Manhattan balcony.

I agree with people who say this book is preachy. It is absolutely intended to make you feel depressed about how you live and eat, and realize that her family is better than yours. The upside is that she gives really practical advice about how to change, and you can either hate and envy her or take the advice and make things better - I think people either love or hate this book depending on which of these they choose. The sections written by Camille Kingsolver are the worst, just insufferably holier-than-thou, so I simply stopped reading those parts. Much better that way.

I really enjoyed reading this! Also it made me hungry and gave me the delusion that when I go back the US I'm going to start making my own cheese. SHE MAKES IT SOUND SO EASY AND FUN, YOU GUYS. Also I admire how non-smug she and her family come across. It is really hard to talk about organic local foods without sounding smug! Hoorays.

Living outside of Virginia for the first time in my life, I get nostalgic for it (although I already know I'll miss Utah's mountains when I leave, and that's years away). So it's hard to separate my general love of Barbara Kingsolver's writing with my adoration of the rolling green hills of, for example, Nelson County in July. Which is pretty close to where Kingsolver's family's year of eating locally unfolds. But I'm not sure those feelings need to be separated; part of Kingsolver's point is that many of us have allowed ourselves to forget (or be ignorant of) where our food comes from, and that both eating and living thoughtfully include an awareness of place, and our relationships to it. It's not preachy, though, it's just plain beautiful.

I can imagine that a lot of people DO find the book preachy, but I guess what I would say to them is this: beautiful as this book is, thinking about industrial agriculture, a bottom-line-driven food industry, and our implicit (sometimes even enthusiastic) support of both is really, really challenging. It can be scary, and it can make you feel guilty about buying a bell pepper in February anywhere other than in California. Fear and guilt are okay–they are okay, if not desirable, because we have things to be scared and feel guilty about (plus, she's right...no February bell pepper from CA tastes quite the way a bell pepper from the farmer's market in the middle of summer does). That's where I think the real power of the book comes in–we open ourselves up to experience the joy of food when we allow ourselves to examine all the ways (some small, some big) that we can choose not to have anything to be scared or feel guilty about.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle makes me excited about my farm share this summer, excited to cook, and excited to eat. Nothing quite like reading the writing of someone in touch with their own capacity for joy.

Barbara Kingsolver and her family move to a farm in Virginia and attempt to eat local foods, mostly foods they have grown themselves. The chapters are a month by month account of the family's struggle. Here and there, Kingsolver, with help from her daughter and husband, toss in scary stories of the food we put into our mouths every day. But the family also shows what a great experience it can be for a family to work together to grow, preserve, and cook their own food.



I finished the book and called my dad. He promised to come till up my
garden for the fall. I also e-mailed all my gardening friends with
the url for Seed Savers Exchange. And I decided to visit the local
farmers' market before school starts. One convert for Kingsolver.