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| Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (P.S.) | 
 enlarge | Authors: Barbara Kingsolver, Camille Kingsolver, Steven L. Hopp
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  313 reviews
Sales Rank: 158
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 400
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.1 x 1.1
ISBN: 0060852569
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.0973
EAN: 9780060852566
ASIN: 0060852569
Publication Date: May 1, 2008
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| Customer Reviews:
 A frou-frou Yuppie look at the fad of "eating locally" September 7, 2007
49 out of 75 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.)
 Negativity abounds February 8, 2008
37 out of 58 found this review helpful
When referring to organic produce, the author asks who put the sanctimony into the phrase organic. If she has read her own book it should be crystal clear that it was none other than herself. Sanctimonious perfectly describes almost the entire book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. I say almost, because the portions added by her daughter and husband are actually informative and enjoyable. The book must not be aimed at the American consumers to which it would be sold, because the author does not have one nice thing to say about her fellow Americans. She has even trained her younger daughter to deny her American heritage by saying that she is American, but not really. You can't possibly hope to influence people's attitudes by attacking them and then explaining why you are so much better, and this is what Kingsolver tries to do. The sad thing is that she even attacks like-minded people. She criticizes a "starlet" for wanting to save farm animals, saying that her logic is flawed. Then the author proceeds to say that dairy cows are bred to produce milk and cannot live without being milked. She should check out her facts before ridiculing someone else for getting them wrong. If a milking cow is not milked, the milk will eventually stop being produced, just like it does for us humans. For large-scale dairy farming, the cow could be milked less and less until the milk dries up. So it is pretty ridiculous to giggle about the starlet's stupidity and then say something really stupid herself.
Ms. Kingsolver repeats over and over in the book that America has no food culture. This is totally untrue. America is a melting pot and has the richest food culture of anywhere else. America absorbed peoples from every nationality and their food cultures along with them. She also avows that the French sample McDonald's, but they don't really eat there. I hate to break it to her, but there are McDonald's restaurants in almost every European city, and if you want to buy a burger there you will have to wait in line. France is no different. The lines are always nearly out the door. I live in a European city with a population of only about 100,000 people, and there are no less than 4 McDonald's here. They are never empty. Ever.
It was difficult for me to get all the way through the book. Most of the factual material was no news to me, and I think the book was a big waste of my time.
 Would have been better as a magazine article. August 19, 2007
35 out of 44 found this review helpful
As a book, it's uneven, contrived and politicized, with some major contradictions and inconsistencies.
Here's the message in a nutshell: To become a more responsible (and self-sufficient)citizen of the world, consider the true cost of your food: the cost of fuel to ship; the cost to the underpaid farm laborer; the cost to the land in clear-cutting, over-use, and chemicals. Better to learn how to grow your own food organically, and buy locally what you can't grow.
That's it.
The rest of the 350+ pages is filled with Kingsolver and family finding ever more ways to repeat that message, interspersed with anecdotes about their year of growing, along with several long distance trips (including one to Italy) in part, to offer more field research. Said field research could have easily been accomplished locally or by phone or internet. If one were to take the jaded view, there's a lesson here on how to have great vacations for free -- write a book including them and get the tax write-offs.
In any case, while clearly Kingsolver feels passionate about getting people on board with being "locivores" (local growers and consumers), she hasn't quite made the leap herself to being more conscious in her consumption of travel fuel. One step at a time for all of us, I guess.
Bottom line -- if becoming a locivore is a totally new concept to you, you'll find a convincing (albeit repetitive) argument for change. If you're already on your way and were hoping to read a detailed account of how someone else did it, you won't find it in this book.
Rich White People Pretend to be Farmers January 19, 2008
32 out of 50 found this review helpful
I don't understand some of these customer reviewers' apparent surprise that a family can "live off the land"--of course they can (people have done that since the beginning of time). The problem is that not everyone can afford their own land in our country (let alone their own home these days, given the economy we live in). But Kingsolver's book does not address these issues at all; it is basically a pretentious display of self-congratulatory, self-perceived superiority, and offers very little useful information for people who DON'T actually own a large chunk of land in Appalachia. Frankly, the book even falls short on the touchy-feely side (there is not real growth, nothing learned, no actually problems, challenges, or difficulties faced).
Although Kingsolver's message about eating locally is salient, and the book is an entertaining read at times, I would like to point out that people CAN eat locally without owning several gardens, traveling to Tuscany for inspiration, and breeding their own heritage turkeys and hens and making their own cheese. Kingsolver's book is basically a story about some rich white people playing at farming. Well, kudos to them, but spare us the mind-numbing boredom of your newly enlightened state, please!
I would recommend that readers stick to Michael Pollan's excellent, informative books if they want useful information about local food. If they want to hear someone brag arrogantly about her own family, all the while insinuating (not so subtly) that every other American lacks culinary taste, food culture, and intelligence, read Kingsolver's book.
 Great, Now I Want Chickens May 13, 2007
26 out of 28 found this review helpful
Wonderful, insightful book about the importance of eating locally, and even more importantly, eating thoughtfully. Barbara Kingsolver details the year in which she and her family strive to live off of foods grown locally, but the book is much more than an interesting personal memoir; she, her husband and their daughter explain in great detail WHY they feel the need to do this.
There is no vague talk or philosophy here, rather very thorough forays into biology, politics, history, education, and every other genre of study that explains how we, as Americans, eat-- which is generally pretty badly. The scientific background of both Ms. Kingsolver and her husband (who has essays scattered throughout the book) really shines through. The decision to eat locally (in this case, from their own garden or farms within the same county) is presented not as a throw-back to a better, earlier time but as the way forward, the beginning of a new and improved chapter. Instead of presenting this painstakingly-researched information in one overwhelming block, Ms. Kingsolver carefully intersperses it with the personal story in easily-digested bites. This keeps both the science and the garden-family-diary part in balance and makes the book very readable.
The personal side of the story is excellent. Growing vegatables; raising poultry; making cheese at home(!!!); baking bread every day (the husband's responsibility in this case); canning, freezing, braiding, and otherwise storing the garden's bounty; each of these and more are a part of the grand experiment. "Deprivation" never sounded so fun or so fufilling. If you've ever dreamed of canning your own tomatoes or keeping chickens, this book will make your yearnings worse.
Ms. Kingsolver and co. are refreshingly non-vegetarian, blithely describing Turkey-Harvest Day (what it sounds like, yes) and explaining both why "vegetarian" crops like corn kill more animals via thresher and pesticide than meaty "crops" like chicken, and why the idea that the world would be better off with more vegetarians is deeply flawed. Vegetarians may be perturbed by their findings, but I think it would still be worth reading with an open mind.
The glimpses into her family life, too, are fascinating-- kids who are more interested in chickens and tomatoes than Playstation and cable? Huh. The book includes several essays by Kingsolver's elder daughter, Camille, who provides an interesting perspective: as both an interested member in this "new" lifestyle and a college freshman, she is a bridge between these cultures.
Like any garden/farm narrative, I suppose, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is very regional and it really captures the flavor of its paticular locale--Virginia. I am a recent transplant to Virginia myself (this is my first spring/summer here) and the book answered some of my questions about this new place, like "Why does my front yard smell like onions? Are those chives growing wild all around the neighborhood?" Apparently they are "ramps". Who knew? Not this Texan. That sudden retreat to freezing last month is a "dogwood winter". I realize that to most readers of this review it's not important, but I felt a sudden thrill of recognition to realize that this farm and author are probably within a hundred miles from here-- to realize that she is describing my newly adopted environment.
My only bone to pick is a very small one. Near the end of the book, Ms Kingsolver expresses surprise that her pet topic of eating locally has suddenly mushroomed from a secret underground movement, to the mainstream. As far as I can tell, this isn't true. Yes, the Times (or whatever it was) has a cover story on eating locally. But I was learning about it back in college (2001-ish) at the University of Vermont. My environmental classes covered the costs of shipping tomatoes and included a trip to the local CSA. That CSA, as well as the one I've joined here in VA, have been around for a while-- at least 5-10 years I think. Ms Kingsolver mentions several upscale restaurants (and one diner) that serve only local foods, and cookbooks. So clearly, this trend/idea/philosophy has been gaining steam for at least a decade, and didn't just pop out of the ground as the book was going to the publisher. But, as I said, small quibble. The book is fantastic, I'd reccommend it to anyone interested in changing the way they eat, gardening, farming, chickens...
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