Animal, Vegetable, Miracle -
Barbara KingsolverHave you ever noticed that a cause hasn't made much of a ripple in this world until powerful people start making disparaging remarks about it? That realization struck me not long ago upon coming across a snide reference to Michael Pollan (
The Omnivore’s Dilemma) on a website devoted to agricultural commodity trading. I seriously doubt that the corn monoculture agribusiness is running scared, but apparently the powers that be in that industry have finally noticed “locavores” and the “slow food” movement. It’s about time, if you ask me…
Before ADM, Cargill, and Monsanto ever gave a rat’s patootie about the local food movement, though, Barbara Kingsolver and her family had already embarked on a grand experiment. Their exercise was little more than a simple lifestyle change, a change that wouldn’t have troubled our grandparents’ generation (perhaps even our parents’) in the least; but a change that somehow strikes most modern-day Americans as a form of deprivation and even masochism. The experiment? They planned to spend an entire year eating only food grown within 100 miles of their home. Three of the family have joined forces to recount their experiences in what I like to call “the year of eating locally” and
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is the result – it's part diary, part cookbook, and part rhetoric; but it's all entertaining.
One reason for such an experiment, the family explains, is that Americans might as well be pouring gasoline on their breakfast cereal and eating peanut butter and crude oil sandwiches for lunch. Stephen Hopp (Kingsolver’s husband) asserts that, on average, each morsel of food travels 1500 miles to reach your lips. That's a long, twisted journey from producer to processor to warehouse to grocery shelf to your pantry. Hopp claims that, “If every U. S. citizen ate just one meal a week (any meal) composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce, we would reduce our country’s oil consumption by 1.1 million barrels of oil
every week¹.”
Health is another factor: detractors of CAFO (Concentrated Agriculture Feeding Operations) will tell you that the meat from those operations – beef, pork, or poultry – is more likely to be contaminated with salmonella,
Listeria,
E. coli, or traces of various pharmaceuticals than is meat from pastured livestock. And last, consider GMO (genetically-modified) food. While the baby-boom generation was raised on the wonders of chemistry, will their grandchildren be raised on the wonders of bioengineering? One need not fear that a rogue gene will escape to take over the world to be at least a
little queasy about something like a soybean with butterfly genes spliced into its DNA.
And last, there's the question of taste: opponents of Big Agriculture avow that your food has been carefully bred for the convenience of the food chain (ease in processing and resistance to damage in shipping, for instance) instead of for flavor. This is an easy one to verify, especially if you have ever compared the taste of fresh-picked sweet corn to the travesty that is frozen "corn on the cob." Ick and double-ick.
So the Kingsolver-Hopp family (mom, dad, nineteen-year-old Camille and nine-year-old Lily) set out to eat their way through twelve pages of the calendar solely on what they could grow themselves or buy from local producers. They weren't complete anchorites in their quest; they still occasionally ate in restaurants, accepted "imported" food at friends' homes, bought organic flour to make their bread at home (because there wasn't a local source), and drank imported wine. But their diet definitely changed: they had no fresh fruit flown from South America and New Zealand in the winter; and no Dolly Partonesque, inbred, "butter-infused" turkey graced their table for Thanksgiving. They lived off a 5000-square-foot garden; wild mushrooms and fruit from their Virginia farm; eggs and poultry they raised themselves; and the local farmer's market.
The theme of
Animal, Vegetable, Mineral can be summed up in this single, simple thought: they survived, and so can you.
First author Barbara Kingsolver is probably familiar to many for her best-selling novels
The Poisonwood Bible (a Pulitzer Prize nominee) and
The Bean Trees. She is also, according to Bernard Goldberg, the 73rd most dangerous person in America (far behind Al Gore and Michael Moore, but pretty close to Phil Donahue). Not only is she an accomplished author and essayist (
High Tide in Tucson), Kingsolver also holds degrees in biology and evolutionary ecology. Her husband and co-author Steven Hopp is likewise a biologist with a specialty in bioacoustics (bird songs, for the most part). Camille Kingsolver, Barbara's daughter, studies biology and dance in college. The family lives on a 100-acre farm in the mountains of southwestern Virginia; such an experiment would, admittedly, have been considerably more difficult in their previous home near Tucson.
The elder Kingsolver wrote the vast majority of
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle; while Hopp contributes several academic-sounding sidebars to support the scientific claims made in the book, and Camille Kingsolver contributes occasional diary entries and her recipes for dishes using the vegetable (and poultry) of the season. The three authors also read their contributions for a CD version of the book, which the Ms tells me reveals both Barbara's mellow delivery (she sounds just like EveryMom) and her wry sense of humor.
In keeping with the subject matter and theme, there's plenty of discussion of the predominance of corn monoculture in
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, just as there was in Pollan's book - as one who lives amid the great corn desert, I can appreciate that thought. The authors point out many of what they consider to be problems with America's food culture; comparing it
most unfavorably to the food culture of Italy (where they vacationed during the year). In its headlong rush to keep bananas on our table year-round and to ship tomatoes from California to New York -
and do it cheaply - agribusiness has fostered a culture that gobbles fast food meals barely distinguishable from the cardboard it came in, and has nearly bred locally-hardy varieties of animals and plants out of existence. Did you know that the variety of turkey you ate last Thanksgiving has been bred for big breasts and small legs (everybody prefers white meat, right?), but cannot reproduce itself without human intervention? You could look it up…
While one might expect such a book to be a dry polemic about saving the earth and our babies from the evils of factory farming, Kingsolver's considerable talents as a writer and diarist make
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle much more entertaining than I'd expected. The text is shot through with wicked humor – if nothing else, you have to read her story about breeding heirloom turkeys - and gentle reminders to "be kind to Mother Earth." There aren't many dry statistics and no shrill denunciation of meat-eaters: though they are
locavores, the family are also carnivores. Pinko-commie left-wingers though they may be, the Kingsolver-Hopp family eats local and organic but not necessarily vegetarian. They may overdose on asparagus in spring and begin to crave fresh fruit in February, but they're healthy and, by golly, they ate pretty well for a year (and they saved money, too…)
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is intended to do two things: the main purpose is to prove to normal, red-blooded Americans that you
can survive eating food that didn't come from a driveup or wrapped in plastic. The second is to show you that you can find food that hasn't been trucked from the San Joaquin valley or flown from Peru. You can find a list of local farmer's markets on the web (and find me at the one nearest me every Saturday during summer), you can grow your own food in a garden – a community garden, if you have no space, or you can join a CSA (Community-Supported Agriculture). It worked in my case, a check to my local CSA farm is in the mail right now. The whole idea is to de-mystify the food chain and show readers where we can take out a few links to shorten it. More power to 'em.
No discussion of this book can be complete without mentioning that the authors are pretty much sitting in "the catbird seat" when it comes to their experiment. Their garden covered more than 5000 square feet, well over a tenth of an acre (the size of many suburban lots). They lived on a 100-year-old farm that had buildings for raising turkeys and chickens, as well as apple and cherry orchards and a prolific crop of wild mushrooms. They had access to local organic farms and farmers markets, even to locally grown wine (they didn't mention beer, though). They flaunted any question of an Atkins diet by gobbling a loaf of bread almost every day.
They also had a stay-at-home Mom and helpful family members (even friends and neighbors) who tended the garden, harvested, and preserved and canned what the family would eat in the coming winter. To assume that all readers are in a similar position would be simply ludicrous – but that was never the assumption of the authors: the point is that everyone has to start somewhere, not that everyone needs to jump ship and live a life entirely off the grid.
So take the challenge yourself: go ahead and try eating locally. If nothing else, perhaps you'll learn what tomatoes and sweet corn
really taste like.
The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan
¹ Hopp does not, however, mention that the USA uses (on average) almost twenty million barrels of crude oil per
day, so that even 1.1 million barrels saved per week is a mere 0.78% reduction. Note also the word “organic”: Hopp explains that fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides (all petroleum-based); not to mention processing; take an even bigger bite out of the US’s energy budget than farming. Still, anything’s better’n nothing…
