Product Description

Author Barbara Kingsolver and her family abandoned the industrial-food pipeline to live a rural life—vowing that, for one year, they'd only buy food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it. Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is an enthralling narrative that will open your eyes in a hundred new ways to an old truth: You are what you eat.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #58 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-01
• Released on: 2008-04-29
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. [Signature]Reviewed by Nina PlanckMichael Pollan is the crack investigator and graceful narrator of the ecology of local food and the toxic logic of industrial agriculture. Now he has a peer. Novelist Kingsolver recounts a year spent eating home-grown food and, if not that, local. Accomplished gardeners, the Kingsolver clan grow a large garden in southern Appalachia and spend summers "putting food by," as the classic kitchen title goes. They make pickles, chutney and mozzarella; they jar tomatoes, braid garlic and stuff turkey sausage. Nine-year-old Lily runs a heritage poultry business, selling eggs and meat. What they don't raise (lamb, beef, apples) comes from local farms. Come winter, they feast on root crops and canned goods, menus slouching toward asparagus. Along the way, the Kingsolver family, having given up industrial meat years before, abandons its vegetarian ways and discovers the pleasures of conscientious carnivory.This field—local food and sustainable agriculture—is crowded with books in increasingly predictable flavors: the earnest manual, diary of an epicure, the environmental battle cry, the accidental gardener. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is all of these, and much smarter. Kingsolver takes the genre to a new literary level; a well-paced narrative and the apparent ease of the beautiful prose makes the pages fly. Her tale is both classy and disarming, substantive and entertaining, earnest and funny. Kingsolver is a moralist ("the conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners"), but more often wry than pious. Another hazard of the genre is snobbery. You won't find it here. Seldom do paeans to heirloom tomatoes (which I grew up selling at farmers' markets) include equal respect for outstanding modern hybrids like Early Girl.Kingsolver has the ear of a journalist and the accuracy of a naturalist. She makes short, neat work of complex topics: what's risky about the vegan diet, why animals belong on ecologically sound farms, why bitterness in lettuce is good. Kingsolver's clue to help greenhorns remember what's in season is the best I've seen. You trace the harvest by botanical development, from buds to fruits to roots. Kingsolver is not the first to note our national "eating disorder" and the injuries industrial agriculture wreaks, yet this practical vision of how we might eat instead is as fresh as just-picked sweet corn. The narrative is peppered with useful sidebars on industrial agriculture and ecology (by husband Steven Hopp) and recipes (by daughter Camille), as if to show that local food—in the growing, buying, cooking, eating and the telling—demands teamwork. (May)Nina Planck is the author of Real Food: What to Eat and Why (Bloomsbury USA, 2006).
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal
Adult/High School–This book chronicles the year that Barbara Kingsolver, along with her husband and two daughters, made a commitment to become locavores–those who eat only locally grown foods. This first entailed a move away from their home in non-food-producing Tuscon to a family farm in Virginia, where they got right down to the business of growing and raising their own food and supporting local farmers. For teens who grew up on supermarket offerings, the notion not only of growing one's own produce but also of harvesting one's own poultry was as foreign as the concept that different foods relate to different seasons. While the volume begins as an environmental treatise–the oil consumption related to transporting foodstuffs around the world is enormous–it ends, as the year ends, in a celebration of the food that physically nourishes even as the recipes and the memories of cooks and gardeners past nourish our hearts and souls. Although the book maintains that eating well is not a class issue, discussions of heirloom breeds and making cheese at home may strike some as high-flown; however, those looking for healthful alternatives to processed foods will find inspiration to seek out farmers' markets and to learn to cook and enjoy seasonal foods. Give this title to budding Martha Stewarts, green-leaning fans of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth (Rodale, 2006), and kids outraged by Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation (Houghton, 2001).–Jenny Gasset, Orange County Public Library, CA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Reviewed by Bunny Crumpacker

If you've ever been lucky enough to eat a tomato in the middle of summer, while it's still warm from the sun, if you've seen a farmer's market filled with fresh produce and happy people, if you've stopped at a farm stand, even (or especially) if it's just a table at the side of the road, you know the difference between the taste of real food and what's sold at the grocery store. But advocates of locally grown produce contend that it's much more than a matter of taste. There's the horror of stockyards and poultry farms and slaughterhouses, and the excessive amounts of energy needed to transport food from one part of the country to another and from the summer of another continent to the winter shelves of our town's stores. But beyond all this, supermarket vegetables and fruits are grown with chemical pesticides and fertilizers and patented modified genes, and supermarket meat comes from animals raised in dense crowds, given hormones and antibiotics (which we in turn swallow), and then killed with abiding cruelty.

To the swelling chorus of concern about the food we grow, buy and eat, add three powerful voices, the authors of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. In a way, the book adds four voices, because its main author -- novelist, essayist and poet Barbara Kingsolver -- speaks in two tones. One is charming, zestful, funny and poetic, while the other is serious and dry, indeed sometimes lecturing and didactic. Both are passionate and caring.

Kingsolver has written most of the book, describing the year in which her family resolved to eat only food they had grown themselves, or that had grown within a hundred miles of their home, a farm in Virginia. The book's informative sidebars are by her husband, Steven L. Hopp, a biologist. Her daughter, Camille (in college, studying biology), has contributed engaging short essays for each month, accompanied by clear, uncomplicated recipes. (A younger daughter, Lily, was the family CEO of fresh eggs.)

Their remarkable year begins in April, when the first asparagus spears poke up from the ground. Sowing, weeding, watering, picking, canning, preserving and joyful eating follow the calendar, with an overabundance of zucchini in the summer, and the food the family has dried, frozen and canned seeing them through the cold months of winter. When March comes, about all that's left are a few quarts of spaghetti sauce, four onions, one head of garlic and, in the freezer, some vegetables and the last turkey.

The raising of the turkeys is a wonderful story all by itself, from the first fluffy babies to the mating, roosting and hatching of next year's batch. Turkey sex is an amazing saga, no less miraculous -- and perhaps even much more so -- than our own.

Can we all do this? Probably not. We may not have the necessary time, energy or access to a shared community plot. We may not be blessed with a sufficiently inspired -- and happy -- family. We may not be willing or able to spend the hot days of August canning all those tomatoes. And we may not have the freezer space (not to mention the barn) required for a year's supply of turkeys and chickens. But all is not lost -- unless we continue to lose it at the supermarket where the food we buy contributes to global warming on the long way from wherever it was raised. ("Americans," writes Hopp in a sidebar, "put almost as much fossil fuel into our refrigerators as [into] our cars.") The book offers a host of suggestions to make a difference, and there are lengthy lists of places to go, things to do and Web sites to visit. Alas, the book lacks an index.

This is a serious book about important problems. Its concerns are real and urgent. It is clear, thoughtful, often amusing, passionate and appealing. It may give you a serious case of supermarket guilt, thinking of the energy footprint left by each out-of-season tomato, but you'll also find unexpected knowledge and gain the ability to make informed choices about what -- and how -- you're willing to eat.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

Localvores Delight
Very few books make me want to be a better person, even fewer make it seem easy. Kingsolver's engaging writing style was as fresh as her veggies. I've spent the past week identifying the location of everything on my plate and feeling better about the future than I thought possible.

Excellent Book. Shares a Space on my Shelf with Pollan
I'm amazed that so many negative reviewers claimed that Ms Kingsolver's tone was smug. I did not get that impression at all, nor was I smacked in the face with "wealth". I suppose some people are just looking to be offended, from any and all directions.

Rather, I found her tone refreshing. Her talent as a writer and her passion as a lover of good food, gardening, and the environment came together beautifully to create an entertaining and inspiring read.

I highly recommend it, along with Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food.
The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

Very Informative and Enjoyable
I have thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. The book is most informative and an eye opener of our food sources. I would love to follow the Kingsolver/Hopp family's "A Year of Food Life" and maybe I'll be able to at some point. Anyway, the book is wonderful.