Animal, Vegetable, Miracle LP - Dark Publications

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Editorial Reviews:

Product Description

Bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver returns with her first nonfiction narrative that will open your eyes in a hundred new ways to an old truth: You are what you eat.

"As the U.S. population made an unprecedented mad dash for the Sun Belt, one carload of us paddled against the tide, heading for the Promised Land where water falls from the sky and green stuff grows all around. We were about to begin the adventure of realigning our lives with our food chain.

"Naturally, our first stop was to buy junk food and fossil fuel. . . ."

Hang on for the ride: With characteristic poetry and pluck, Barbara Kingsolver and her family sweep readers along on their journey away from the industrial-food pipeline to a rural life in which they vow to buy only food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it. Their good-humored search yields surprising discoveries about turkey sex life and overly zealous zucchini plants, en route to a food culture that's better for the neighborhood and also better on the table. Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle makes a passionate case for putting the kitchen back at the center of family life and diversified farms at the center of the American diet.

"This is the story of a year in which we made every attempt to feed ourselves animals and vegetables whose provenance we really knew . . . and of how our family was changed by our first year of deliberately eating food produced from the same place where we worked, went to school, loved our neighbors, drank the water, and breathed the air."

Customer Reviews: Read 316 more reviews...

5 out of 5 stars

This is a fascinating informative book about food May 8, 2007
166 out of 189 found this review helpful

It is possible to live off the land. The Kingsolver family are proof of that. They grew their own food for a year on a farm in Virginia's Applachian mountains. It only cost 50 cents a meal to feed the Kingsolver family of four for a year, and I found that to be amazing. It is much healthier to eat organic foods which are foods produced without chemicals. This is one of the main ideas of this insightful book. I love Camille's Kingsolver's contributions in this book. She is the college age daughter of the primary author. Camille's reflections about food are thoughtful, and her recipes sound delicious. I loved her essay about how she learned to love asparagus. I learned that asparagus is an excellent source of vitamin C, which I did not know before. There is a recipe in here for an asparagus mushroom bread pudding. I never thought of putting these ingredients together. Another interesting recipe in the book is one for zucchini chocolate chip cookies. The recipe sounds so unusual, I am tempted to try it. The recipe for pumpkin soup and sweet potato quesadillas sound yummy too. Everyone in the Kingsolver family contributed in this local food project. Barbara raised and bred turkeys, while her nine year old daughter raised her own chickens and provided the family with eggs for a year. They even made their own cheese.

I also enjoyed the contributions of Steven L. Hopp in this book. He is a professor who teaches environmental science at Emory and Henry College. His short contributions in the every chapter are very insightful. He really compliments the main text written by Kingsolver. I enjoyed reading his thoughts about the popularity of agricultural education in public schools. This is a fascinating and informative book about food.

5 out of 5 stars

Back to the garden! May 5, 2007
143 out of 151 found this review helpful

Three hundred and sixty-eight pages, no pretty pictures, and it's about food? Yes it is, and it's fascinating. Written by best-selling novelist Barbara Kingsolver, her scientist hubby and teenage daughter, "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" chronicles the true story of the family's adventures as they move to a farm in rural Virginia and vow to eat locally for one year. They grow their own vegetables, raise their own poultry and buy the rest of their food directly from farmers markets and other local sources. There are touching human stories here (the family's 9-year-old learns a secret to raising chickens for food: don't name them!) but the book's purpose is serious food for thought: it argues the economic, social and health benefits of putting local foods at the center of a family diet. As Kingsolver details the family's experience month-by-month, husband Steven adds sidebars on the problems of industrial agriculture and daughter Camille tosses in some first-person essays ("Growing Up in the Kitchen") and recipes ("Holiday Corn Pudding a Nine-Year-Old Can Make").

And it is all so well written! Kingsolver can veer way off topic -- wandering off into subjects like rural politics, even turkey sex -- and still, somehow, stay right on point. Her husband can say more in two pages than some professors I know can say in 200, and the daughter's writings... well I often couldn't tell who was writing what without checking for the byline.

The book looks and feels great, too. The dust jacket has been pressed into the nubby texture of burlap. The pages have ragged edges, which makes them soft on your fingers.

Reading this book, drinking my Phosphoric Acid Diet Coke and snacking on some Partially Hydrogenated Palm Kernel Oil Walt Disney World Hungry Heroes Yogurt Pretzels, I suddenly felt like I was a kid again, sitting in my bedroom in 1969 listening to that Joni Mitchell "Woodstock" lyric: "Time to get back to the land, and set my soul free." Now that song is stuck back in my head! Maybe it should have never left.

5 out of 5 stars

More exposure of an American epidemic May 10, 2007
99 out of 112 found this review helpful

Look what happened when the nation turned its attention to the tobacco industry. If only that would happen with the fast food/processed food industry. One can only dream.....

Thank you so much, Barbara Kingsolver, for grabbing that attention and making it the focus of your new book. I loved it. It was so well written.

I hope this subject really catches the attention of more and more people. For our familys conversion to organic and local, mindful eating it started with the movie, "Supersize Me," and went on to "Fast Food Nation, etc."
Ms. Kingsolver points out in her book it is a slow process to weed yourself off that junk food.

Ms. Kingsolver opens up the doors to her farm and family life to share how we can save our lives (literally) and the world by eating local, fresh and home grown. Put down that twinkie and pop! Pick up a hoe and educate yourself on the dangers of fast food and processed food!

Blue jello? Come on! What part of that is natural, real food? But I dare you to eat a Christmas colored bean, like the one on the book cover.

Ms. Kingsolver also shares about how rare it is to see/find true animal breeding in the modern world. She states in the book it was impossible to find modern resources and had to look to the past to find the answers.
Nature has been bred out of the animals we eat. And she writes about it so eloquently!

Sorry this review is all over the place! I was so excited to see Ms. Kingsolvers new book out; and it is on a subject that is near and dear to my heart. The narrative is incredibly well written. It is very inspiring.

1 out of 5 stars

Unrealistic, sad guilt trip that has many flaws October 23, 2007
55 out of 96 found this review helpful

I bought this book thinking it would be something like "A Year Without Made in China" whereby the author gives their attempt at getting by without products made in China, and the failures and humorous anecdotes along the way. I thought maybe this book would be similar but instead Kingsolver (and her family as well) comes across as preachy and arrogant.

First of all you must realize that if you are "eating healthy" by eating more fruits and vegetables, that is not enough. Nor is eating organic fruits, vegetables, and meats. Nooo, you must be eating locally grown organic (although not necessarily certified because that's just too damn expensive) fruits, vegetables, and meats. Really, you should have your own apple orchard, nut trees, vegetable garden, lambs, chickens, and turkeys. Ok, if you've stayed with me this far you're doing great.

Now you know the entire food industry is in cahoots with the oil industry, right? I mean corn syrup for soft drinks, corn in your corn chips, corn grown with machinery that uses fossil fuels, shipped to you with fossil fuels is bad bad bad...I mean using fossil fuels for your food production is a major theme in this book, with Kingsolver harping over & over about it. But wait! She visits friends in Massachusetts that have fantastic tasting tomatoes that are grown far earlier in the season than anyone else in New England can dream of! How in the world do they do this!??? Well, by golly, they have a greenhouse! Wait, isn't it too cold in Mass. for the greenhouse? Well, they heat it with...wait for it...natural gas! You know that silly old fossil fuel that is we're running out of! Ok, sarcasm over, you get the idea. There are so many flaws in the book like this it's pathetic, I'll only mention the trip to Italy, the drive around the country, etc. The endless preaching wears thin but is perfect therapy if you grew up Catholic.

Also, it seems incredibly hard to believe that the family had no failures. Everything was a success! Asparagus, tomatoes, potatoes, chickens,..no pests, no crop failures, no droughts. If you have ever had a garden in the summer you know this never happens.

By the way, Mrs. Kingsolver, was the paper used to print the million copies of your book grown on locally harvested trees? Wait, the paper came from trees in Canada shipped to the U.S.A.? What were you thinking!?

2 out of 5 stars

A frou-frou Yuppie look at the fad of "eating locally" September 7, 2007
50 out of 77 found this review helpful

I am a fan of Ms. Kingsolver as a skilled fiction writer (Poisonwood Bible, etc.), and this scolding treatise on local eating is well written. But like all non-fiction works that take a hard line on some issue and then attempt to bludgeon the reader into compliance, it's frequently dull and has the tone of a lecture, rather than the lyrical look at a family farm that I think was the intention.

Eating from local sources is ALWAYS a good idea, and many of us have ALWAYS done it, without politics or finger-waggling required. Any idiot (I hope) knows that a ripe homegrown peach is about 10,000 times more delicious than a rock hard, meally fruit from Chile and no more convincing is required than a single bite of ripe peach in peach season. But eating entirely locally is not a reality for most people -- for anyone who has to live in a city or a suburb, who has to work at a full-time occupation, who has to live and work in a desert climate, etc.

Unlike nearly everyone else, Ms. Kingsolver and her husband inherited a nice little farm in rural Virginia. She's a famous (and well paid) author and he is a professor of biology at a local college. In other words, neither of them have to work at full-time ordinary jobs and neither of them has to commute to a miserable office job miles from their home. In fact, when they "feel like" moving from hot deserty Tucson to richly fertile Virginia, it's no-problemo, because they have the money and inherited farm to do so. As for the rest of us, we might as well be reading about how they sailed around the world on their inherited YACHT.

The "Hopsolvers" (combo of Kingsolver and her husband's surname) also can afford fancy, fuel-burning trips to Italy, which seem at odds with her rigid theories on not expending fossil fuels for food (or pleasure). But OOPS, of course this was an, errr....fact finding trip for the book. As such, a total tax write off, food and all.

I think I lost faith very early on, when Ms. Kingsolver decided to eat all local Virginia foods...EXCEPT coffee, olive oil, sugar, salt and all spices. HUH???? However, she bans, very vocally, simple things like bananas, orange juice, raisins and tropical fruits like pineapple and mango (all healthy foods). This is out and out stupid. Coffee comes from the same exotic locales as tropical fruit! Just because she likes (and presumably feels she "needs' coffee to wake up in the morning), why should that get a pass? Sorry Barb, but that's total hypocrisy.

Taken to logical extremes, we'd be eating like our ancestors all right -- we'd have rickets and scurvy (without citrus). Our teeth would rot out of our heads by age 35. Some "neighbor" would raise or can food with botulism, or raise dirty animals with salmonella, trichonosis, etc. and we'd get sick or die from it. And in the years that were not so good, we wouldn't end the year with a few jars of spaghetti sauce -- we'd end the year STARVING. (In the Hopsolver's case, though, I think they would just skulk off secretly to the grocery store where they buy their coffee and imported olive oil.)

I also agree with reviewers who find that the blissful family life of the Hopesolvers is hard to take, in a Seventh Heaven sort of way. No fights? No kids whining for candy or gum? Nobody who gets sick of the veggie-heavy fare? Nobody who wants raisin bran for breakfast or a banana in their corn flakes? Nobody who gets sick of butchering and gutting livestock? Hubby Steven never wakes up and says "hey I don't feel like kneading dough and baking organic bread all day -- IN THE SUMMER HEAT?" Just blissfully happy kids and spouse who are in 100% agreement with mom's extremist cooking fads (she USED to be a vegan, but now will eat homegrown meat, etc.). Frankly people, this is sci fi.

Daughter Camille adds some sidebars about college life and some appealing recipes, but Dad Steven writes some boring scientific drivel that is best skipped over. In conclusion: good recipes, nice writing about the VA locale, but a basically myopic, yuppie, airheaded theory about "local eating" which is faddish and unsustainable in the modern world by us regular (farmless city) folks.

(BTW: written while consuming a perfectly delicious, healthy, dead ripe Hawaiian pineapple and loving every bite of it.)

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