Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life Barbara Kingsolver, with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver (HarperCollins)
When Fri 5/18, 7:30 PM
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Motivated by the widely reported statistic that the average North American meal travels between 1,500 and 3,000 miles from farm to table, the authors of each memoir–novelist Barbara Kingsolver (with help from her family) and writer-journalists Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon–set themselves a common task: spend a year sourcing their food from their immediate environs. The environmental realities driving their decisions are undeniably compelling–those air-freighted tomatoes leave a catastrophic carbon footprint–but their projects share a cultural component as well. The authors are hungry to forge a closer connection with the natural world and the men and women who farm it and to see what kind of positive change that connection might effect in their own lives. With such an earnest, if worthy, mission it’s amazing that even one of the two is actually a good read.
Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle begins as she and her family uproot themselves from their longtime home outside Tucson, the setting of many of Kingsolver’s justly acclaimed novels, for their new digs–a rural Virginia farm they had previously used as a summer home. There, she says, “we would take a food sabbatical, getting our hands dirty in some of the actual dying arts of food production.”
Kingsolver traps herself in her own mythmaking: on one hand she insists they’re just a normal(ish) American family; on the other she takes pride in their nerdiness, their old-fashioned off-the-grid lifestyle. At one point she giggles over being named number 73 on political commentator Bernard Goldberg’s post-9/11 list of 100 people “screwing up America” while disemboweling a turkey she’s just killed. This is no normal American family.
Unlike Kingsolver, who revels in her role as a housewife, Smith, a child of the 70s, freely admits she never learned the “household arts”–a failure of child rearing she chalks up to a feminist impulse on her mother’s part. (“Learn to type, and you would become a secretary. Learn to cook, and you were doomed to be a housewife.”) MacKinnon’s the domestic workhorse in their family. As the months roll on and the two of them grapple with the vagaries of onion storage and tomato canning in a one-bedroom apartment, they bicker and fight. They take turns narrating chapters, and each speaks frankly of dark moments of doubt–about the project and about each other (conversations devolve into “Why are we even together?”).
