Lovely Little Shelf

The Book: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, by Barbara Kingsolver

The Story: I’ve kind of been on a non-fiction kick lately.  I have two more non-fiction books to review this week.  Really weird for me.  Hm.

Anyway.  In this book, Barbara Kingsolver documents the year that she and her family spent on their farm in Virginia basically living on the land.  They grew/raised nearly all of their food for the year and anything that they didn’t grow or raise they bought from local farmers via farmers markets or direct sales.

The family had a handful of reasons for doing this.  One of the ones that she goes into is just the crazy state of the industrial food industry right now.  It’s a total mess.  The biggest one though, I felt like, was that she just wanted to connect to something very gritty and real that her ancestors had all been connected to.  She talked about how truly bizarre that is that we can get pineapples, mangos, and all these tropical fruits year round and we’ve just come to expect this.  Even 50 years ago, this was not the case at all.  You ate veggies when they were in season.  If you wanted them beyond that, you canned them while they were in season.  I think that her family just wanted to be connected to this lifestyle.

There’s a lot of good solid info in here about gardening on your own and, if that isn’t an option, getting foods locally and just making good decisions food-wise.

What I Thought: I went into this one pretty excited.  Eating local is something that Shaun and I are pretty into.  We’re part of a CSA and are pretty much farmer’s market addicts.  After you’ve had fresh picked veggies that haven’t been processed beyond words, I think it’s hard to look back.  We are lucky enough to live in an area where this is not hard to do.  Come on, folks.  We live in Ohio.  We have all of this at our fingertips.  We also are apartment-dwellers, so growing our own food is just out of the question.  So we do get our food at the grocery, especially in the winter.  And we eat out every once in awhile, but I would say that local eating is something that is well on our radar and something that we care about.

All that to say, I was a captive, ready audience.  I went in hoping for tips on how to do live this way more than we already do.  I knew that we would not be able to replicate (probably ever in our lives) the experiment that the Kingsolver family did.  I think a lot of people are turned off from this book because they feel like the author is trying to make them feel guilty for not being able to go all in.  I thought exactly the opposite.  I kind of thought that the overlying message was that buy whatever you can local.  Do whatever you can to live this lifestyle.  Any changes are better than none.  And I think that that is right on.

Based on this book, I think something that we are going to try to change is where we get our meat.  With very few exceptions, we just get it at the chain grocery store that we shop at.  From time to time, we’ve gotten it at the farmer’s market and we’ve always loved how it tasted, but we just don’t meal plan around what we can get there.  I think that this spring and summer this is going to be something that we really change. It’s little changes like this that I think that the author was trying to get readers to make, not total life overhauls.

I kind of liked the narrative, following along with the family as they planted, harvested and ate all the goodies that they could grow on their farm.  I kind of wished that she had let her daughters and husband be real “characters” instead of just happy farming robots.  I want to know the aggravation that comes with this lifestyle as well as the perks.  I know, especially for her 10 year old daughter, that sometimes she had to have just BEGGED for a candy bar, only to be told that chocolate is in no way local.  Ya know?

The other thing I thought was missing was talking about how to do this if your environment is a little bit more harsh.  They moved from Arizona to Virginia to take on this challenge.  How did they live this way in Arizona? How can people that don’t live in deliciously temperate climates take this on?  I kept kind of expecting her to talk to this, but she never did.

Conclusion: I would say that going into this looking for a life overhaul will only leave you overwhelmed.  I do think think that the premise is something that is really important for Americans to think about though.  Go in looking for pointers and small changes you can make to help support your local farmers and eat healthier (and tastier!).