What, Who, When: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver, Camille Kingsolver and Steven Hopp in 2007.
Why on Earth: This is a secret about me. I desperately wish I were a farmer. Not a corn farmer, or a big industrial farmer, but a live-on-a-farm person who grows things for a living. This is also a secret about me. I wish that dusk marked the end of work and punctuated porch-sitting, supper-having and sleep. The only thing I wouldn’t give up is the Internet and frankly, I’d give that up too if I thought I could make a sustainable living, while still being able to afford visits to my family and thrive while growing tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers, melons and pumpkins. One more secret about me. I think my greatest failure is being unable to participate in an eat local challenge, because I crave variety and exotic flavors. This is a character flaw that I haven’t been able to conquer.
That said, a book by an author who can seduce me (at least in one instance, The Poisonwood Bible) about a topic on which I devour everything written, was a natural choice. Kingsolver applies her experience writing to my favorite topic, eating locally. For a year, she and her family work the land on a Virginia farm, eating only what they grow or can get from neighbors. That means no pineapples and no bananas. No out-of-season veggies. The family even made every effort to get locally ground flour for the homemade bread. Raising chickens? Check. Heirloom turkeys? Check. Thanksgiving from scratch? You bet. It was a natural fit for a person who regularly tries to make her own bread and butter and fantasizes about rural living.
Well?: Kingsolver may have applied her writing experience to the book but doesn’t seem to put any elbow grease into it. Aside from inspired sections on the beauty of fresh growing asparagus in the spring and turkey birthing habits, much of the book reads like a scolding for eating beef, tropical fruits or buying non-organic. Even for me, someone so completely on the wagon I should be driving it, it sounded preachy at times. It isn’t helped by the hefty dose of nepotism. Camille Kingsolver writes with a heavy hand, recipes trapped in English 101 and weighed down with lectures on ethical eating. She loses credibility altogether when, near the end of the book, she descends from the soapbox long enough to admit she only engaged in her family’s experiment for part of the year. I desperately wanted to like the book and Camille. But, perhaps because I expected a lay-person’s look at a year of living locally and got a zealot’s treatise, some of the shine was tarnished for me.
Posted in the book project
