Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

I’d been meaning to read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle for months and I finally got around to it last week.  I love Barbara Kingsolver’s writing voice.  We’ve expanded out vegetable garden this year and I’ve been enjoying creating new recipes with vegetables from our CSA.  Still, I was sure what I would think of this book.  Would I find the tone too preachy?  Would I be consumed with guilt about my own foodways and end up putting it down part way through?  Or would I savor it and use it to inspire me to make more changes in how I buy and consume food?

Fortunately, my reaction was far closer to the latter.  While many of the changes the Kingsolver-Hopp family made in their own diets and food-buying “rules” are different than choices I find practical for me at this time, I thought the tone of the book was perfect.  Kingsolver never pretended that her family intended to be perfect in their attempt to eat locally for a year. She willingly admitted that they occasionally made purchases with greater food miles like cranberries for Thanksgiving and some Florida citrus in January.  For me, their efforts to change their own patterns of eating and see how much of their own food they could grow felt much more authentic and inspiring because they weren’t on an all-out, rigid crusade.

I savored the wonderful writing, made note of several of the recipes, and I’m thinking through some changes that I want to make in my own foodways.  I’m looking more closely at where my produce is coming from in the grocery store, shopping at the farmer’s market more, and making more choices to by local produce when it’s available even it if costs more.   I’m considering a vow to stop eating meat from CAFO farms.  There are a few farms with pasture raised animals in my area that sell shares of cows or pigs when they slaughter them in the fall.  For years we’ve talked about purchasing a share or splitting one with another family.  Maybe this fall we actually will.

I learned a lot from the book, some of it expected like gardening knowledge, a better feel for what’s in season (I live fairly close to Kingsolver so our agricultural year runs like hers does), some of it unexpected, intricacies of turkey mating, agritourism in Italy, all of it welcome.  I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to know more about where our food comes from and what each of us can do to improve agriculture in America.