Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver

Have you ever wondered why a stalk of asparagus, although readily available year round, never tastes as good as it does in April, and why a winter squash soup complements so perfectly a cold winter’ day? Or why a conventionally grown tomato arrives in grocery stores hard, white, and tasteless throughout the winter? Are you baffled at the words “genetic modification,” or do you think they have nothing to do with you and the food you eat? How are genetic engineering, pesticides, and conventional, non-sustainable agriculture practices contributing to the rise of cancers, allergies, and other ailments, not to mention environmental destruction? 

Do you wonder what “heirloom” means when referred to a tomato, melon, onion, or any other variety of meat or produce, or how many chickens a “concentrated animal feeding operation” (a CAFO) could fit in your bathroom? (Answer: about 1,152 chickens)! Does it bother you that our national eating disorder and bad eating habits are leading to the prediction that our kids will be the first generation in history to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents? 

Do you care about what you eat, where it comes from, what it’s made of, and the impact of that food on your health, the environment, and your culture? If the answer to any of these questions is “yes,” you will enjoy Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.

Kingsolver’s true story of her family’s journey away from the “industrial-food pipeline” to embrace a rural life in which they “buy only food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it.” Embracing the Slow Foods Model of eating and living, “to protect the pleasures of the table from the homogenization of modern fast food and life,” and the premise on which Dining Details was founded,  “Eating home cooked meals from whole, in-season ingredients obtained from the most local source available is eating well, in every sense. Good for the habitat, good for the body.” While promoting the chefs that have helped to establish a positive American food culture, the small farmers who care about their product and their customers, and the consumers that make the effort to move food culture and environmental consciousness in a positive direction, Kingsolver reminds us, in a good-humored way, that we all have a role to play in fight for good food.

We see more and more ingredients available year-round, like the asparagus in October and the hard, whitish pink tomatoes in January, all with decreased palatability, accepting “a tradeoff that amounts to ‘Give me every vegetable in every season, even if it tastes like a cardboard picture of its former self.’ You’d think we cared more about the idea of what we are eating than about what we’re eating” (55) We are not getting the nutrition we think we are- no the satisfaction we crave from the vegetable, grown with growth hormones in dead soil, picked midlife and shipped 2000 miles, held in refrigerated cases without oxygen. We turn to soft drinks and junk food, instead, seeking flavor! (Consuming on average 54.8 gallons of soft drinks per person, per year!) Eating live food, grown and picked in the season it is supposed to grow, assures us life, vitality, and nutritional satisfaction.

 A little fact to chew on: “If every US 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 over 1.1 million barrels of oil every week. That’s not gallons, but barrels. Small changes in buying habits can make big differences. Becoming a less energy-dependent nation may just need to start with a good breakfast” (p 5).

One does not have to go to such extremes as Kingsolver and her family, raising one’s own chickens and living off one’s own garden, but we do need to be conscious of how we eat and how it affects us. Eating more locally grown food isn’t difficult, it just takes a little extra effort.

“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.”