I've wanted to write about Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver, ever since I first read it a year ago. I read a rash of books at the end of last year that had some impact on me, but of them all, Kingsolver's book really changed my life the most. And when the weather turned cool again this fall, and the days became darker, I found myself wanting to read it again, which is not something I typically do, especially with a book read as recently as last year. But Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is that good.
It fits neatly into a sub-genre of memoir that has gained popularity in recent years: the "do-something-for-a-year-and-then-write-about-it" memoir. (No Impact Man and Julie and Julia come to mind as recently high profile examples of this genre.) Publishers keep churning these babies out, presumably because people like reading about such neat, ostensibly life-changing experiments. And, of course, that is what these books purport to contain; after all, if such experiments had not been life-changing, it wouldn't be worth much to write a book about it, would it?
So this is where I filed Animal, Vegetable, Miracle when I idly picked it up off the "Notable Paperbacks" table at the bookstore, and then idly took it home, and then idly began reading the first chapter. Kingsolver's take on the genre involves her family – a husband and two daughters – who move from their desert home in Tuscan, Arizona, to a family farm in the rolling hills of southern Virginia. Both Kingsolver and her husband grew up in this area of the country, and both feel that it's a return to their roots; for their daughters, both desert-born and raised, the move is quite a change, but it's also an adventure. Kingsolver takes this move as an opportunity, a move away the Tuscan food culture, in which food and water are imported from elsewhere, to a place where food can be (and is) grown all around her. The goal: for a year, eat only the food she and her family can grow for themselves or buy from someone they know.
Like all books of this sort, much of the beginning is devoted to explaining the "rules," and as with all these experiments, there are the inevitable concessions that must be made. In Kingsolver's case, these exceptions involve wheat milled in her county but grown elsewhere, and a single splurge item for each family member: coffee for her husband, spices for her, dried fruit for her children. Kingsolver also spends a great deal of time in the first chapters to detailing her family's reasons behind adopting this kind of lifestyle, and although her reasoning is sound, it's not entirely groundbreaking. Needless to say, the first chapters are something of an appetizer, a place where we get to know the dramatis personae and the location (which is a character in its own right, alongside Kingsolver and her family).
It's when Kingsolver begins to detail her year of eating locally that the narrative really unfolds. It's loosely structured around what Kingsolver calls the "vegetannual," a year in terms of crop growth, beginning with the first shoots of asparagus in early spring and continuing right through the harvesting of pumpkins and potatoes in the fall. Kingsolver refuses to adhere to a rigid structure, and each chapter blooms organically, centered around a different aspect of the successive seasons. One chapter is devoted to asparagus and morels, another to the mid-summer quiet period (during which the adults take a foodie vacation to Italy and encounter marvels), another to canning tomatoes, which occupies much of August. One of my favorite chapters involves eight-year-old Lily's egg business and details the careful planning for and arrival of the spring chickens, as well as Lily's near-obsessive devotion to poultry. Another discusses the intricacies of making homemade cheese.
The structure is where the implicit theme of the book reveals itself—though the expressed goal is to eat locally, it quickly becomes clear that eating locally, for Kingsolver and her family, also means eating seasonally. And it is the seasons, the "vegetannual," and the yearly observation of crops grown and eaten in their proper time that truly obsesses Kingsolver and makes her book so much more than a simple tract on eating organically. For eating seasonally means accepting both bounty and scarcity, of learning to do without, of learning to preserve, and of learning to accept that there is a time for everything. These are the lessons that Animal, Vegetable, Miracle really contains, lessons that are, by their very nature, so antithetical to our contemporary habits of wantonness and waste.
It doesn't hurt that Kingsolver is an adept writer by profession, and her proverbs and anecdotes are sprinkled with plenty of good humor and lyricism. At times, her writing drifts dangerously close to a treacly, worshipful sentimentality, but in general she retains good control of her lyrical monster and renders, on the whole, not only an important and timely memoir, but a well-written one as well.
The packaging of the book is one of its greatest strengths. Not simply a memoir by Kingsolver, it's also packed with text inserts authored by her husband, Stephen L. Hopp, describing the political background to many of the concepts mentioned. In addition, each chapter is followed by a short essay by the oldest daughter, Camille (eighteen when the book was written), detailing her perspective, and offering seasonal recipes and meal plans to accompany the content in the chapter. Finally, there is also a searchable companion website, which contains many of the recipes found in the book, along with other tips and tidbits.
For someone who grew up knowing little to nothing about growing, preserving, and cooking my own food, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle was an eye-opener and a life-changer. It showed me the importance of our food choices and instilled in me a much more passionate relationship with food (and the culture that surrounds it) than I ever had before. If I could, I would give this book to everyone I know.
No comments:
Post a Comment