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coraaAnimal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
, Barbara Kingsolver (Nonfiction)
I really enjoyed this book, and yet I'm not sure how to recommend it.
I think the first thing to say is: the author is a particular kind of liberal (class-conscious, ecology-conscious, tending to skepticism and mistrust of big business, invested in social change). If you are at least moderately sympathetic to this kind of liberalism, the book is probably fine for you -- but if you aren't, the book doesn't spend a lot of time trying to convince you. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is about convincing people who lean liberal to care about agriculture, not convincing people who don't lean liberal to do so. If you don't sympathize with those viewpoints to start with, you'll probably want to throw the book at the wall, and so probably shouldn't bother.
That said. If you are, at least, sympathetic to that strain of liberalism, I'd recommend the book.
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is a diary of Kingsolver's family's attempt to eat entirely local food for a year. They have a few starting exemptions: the whole family will continue to use wheat flour, even though wheat doesn't grow in their Virginia home, and each family member has one personal exemption (coffee, spices, and dried fruit are among the exemptions), but apart from those limited exceptions, if they didn't buy it in season (or grow it themselves -- they have a deeply impressive, envy-worthy vegetable garden), they don't eat it.
As someone who has been eating local produce for the past year, this book was absolutely fascinating to me. The seasonal produce available in Virginia is somewhat different than what's available in Seattle -- but it's close enough that I recognize the pattern: asparagus until you're sick of it, then peas, then peppers, then tomatoes, then corn, then squash, and finally onions, turnips, and potatoes, and the long winter of eating out of your freezer. (Kingsolver doesn't shun modern technology: during the excesses of midsummer, they freeze, can, bottle, dry, and otherwise preserve the abundance of summer foods for the long months of January and February when little grows.) The emphasis is on not shipping food hundreds or thousands of miles to get to you: the emphasis is on eating things that were grown right around the corner.
The one topic about which I found myself torn was what I perceived as her romanticization of farm people. See, I know, intellectually, that what I call 'romanticization' isn't really a fair assessment: Kingsolver lives with farm people, grew up with farm people, isn't portraying them that way out of ignorance or illusion bought by distance. And yet... I grew up in Idaho; I knew farm people, too, and they weren't the close-to-the-earth people she describes. I don't know whether my farm people are unusually far to one side of the scale or hers are unusually far to the other, or both, but I didn't have any frission of recognition when she described the farm people she knew. And I did grow up in a fairly small, ag-heavy town. (Also, while I share her concerns about rampant pesticide use and irresponsible antibiotic use, I think it sometimes trended toward technophobia -- which I am less sympathetic to.) The other potential problem is that the book can seem pretty preachy, which is offputting, especially if you're not already pretty convinced.
The other topic with which I found problem is the inherent privilege (yeah, I used the p-word) of the position. It'd be great if everyone could take the time and money to attend farmer's markets and cook their own food from scratch. I do it. But I'm acutely aware that I have, comparatively, a fair bit of money and a fair bit of time. A lot of people are pressed for one or both, and I think that any long-lasting solution to food-system problems is going to have to address the people who honestly can't afford (in time or money) much better than mac-n-cheese and chicken nuggets -- and/or who live in poor urban areas where local food is just plain not available. These problems need solving too, and pretending that they can be solved if the very poor will just try harder is not tenable.
But. But, in general, I really appreciated this book. It deals with a topic that's close to my heart: mindful domesticity. I sometimes feel that I'm slacking -- I spend, some days, upwards of an hour preparing my dinner, and it's a pleasure for me, but sometimes it feels like a bit of frivolity. ("I'd love to do that," friends say, "I'm just too busy," and I wonder if it reflects badly on me that I'm not too busy, that I can spend an hour making soup or roast or casserole, if I want.) It was delightful to read a book that reveled in the same kind of deliberate attention to food that I take pleasure in day-by-day.
The book contains between-chapter essays written by Kingsolver's older daughter. I hate to say this, because it sounds really judgmental, but she writes like an extremely literate nineteen-year-old. (Not a slam: she was nineteen when the book was published.) Which is to say, the inter-chapter bits are entirely readable, but the prose is a little bit, well, purple. This is made up for with great recipes in those sections, however.
Do be aware: the family in the book were not vegetarians for the duration, though they only bought local meats. In fact, they began a breeding flock of heritage turkeys -- and, in due course, slaughtered all but two of the male turkeys for meat for the freezer. (Too many males leads to infighting in the flock.) The females lived to breed another generation. (They also had a breeding flock of chickens, though, while the turkeys were bred mostly for meat, the hens were bred for egg-laying -- but the excess roosters also were slaughtered for food.) I respect that a great deal -- I do feel that, if I'm going to eat meat, I need to be willing to fully face my choice to end an animal's life for my own sustenance -- but the chapter about the turkey slaughter is a little gruesome. I wasn't bothered, but you might be -- especially the vegetarians out there.
But I keep diverging into qualifiers, and that's not really fair to the book. In a lot of ways, it swept me up into the pleasures of food: from planting and harvesting (it really made me long to have a big garden; her chapter on having a plethora of tomatoes to eat, dry, and can filled me with acute jealousy) to using and cooking. And I love food, love taking home a really beautiful bunch of purply-orange carrots and figuring out what to do with them, chopping them for mirepoix or glazing them with ginger and dill or slicing them for chicken soup. I just do. I love it. And the book gave me the most joy when it reminded me why.
Again: if you aren't already a pretty progressive liberal, this book is not going to convince you to become one. But if you are one, the book might convince you to become a progressive liberal who's also interested in the politics and ecology of food (even if you don't go to quite the same lengths -- as I'm not going to; no giving up lemons and limes for me). At any rate, I found it really fascinating -- and though I'm unlikely to eat nothing but local for a whole year (as interesting as the experiment may be), it inspired me to continue with my high proportion of local produce, even through the long and squash-filled winter.
(Also, now I want chickens of my own. Darn you,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
triath, for putting the idea in my head in the first place.)
(I'd now like to go on to read Plenty: Eating Locally on the 100-Mile Diet
, by a Canadian couple who don't 'cheat' with non-local wheat flour, coffee, or anything like that. For one thing, I'm curious how one manages with an even more hardcore locavore diet; for another thing, their location -- British Columbia -- is even more like Seattle than Virginia is. The comparison ought to be fascinating.)
, Barbara Kingsolver (Nonfiction)I really enjoyed this book, and yet I'm not sure how to recommend it.
I think the first thing to say is: the author is a particular kind of liberal (class-conscious, ecology-conscious, tending to skepticism and mistrust of big business, invested in social change). If you are at least moderately sympathetic to this kind of liberalism, the book is probably fine for you -- but if you aren't, the book doesn't spend a lot of time trying to convince you. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is about convincing people who lean liberal to care about agriculture, not convincing people who don't lean liberal to do so. If you don't sympathize with those viewpoints to start with, you'll probably want to throw the book at the wall, and so probably shouldn't bother.
That said. If you are, at least, sympathetic to that strain of liberalism, I'd recommend the book.
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is a diary of Kingsolver's family's attempt to eat entirely local food for a year. They have a few starting exemptions: the whole family will continue to use wheat flour, even though wheat doesn't grow in their Virginia home, and each family member has one personal exemption (coffee, spices, and dried fruit are among the exemptions), but apart from those limited exceptions, if they didn't buy it in season (or grow it themselves -- they have a deeply impressive, envy-worthy vegetable garden), they don't eat it.
As someone who has been eating local produce for the past year, this book was absolutely fascinating to me. The seasonal produce available in Virginia is somewhat different than what's available in Seattle -- but it's close enough that I recognize the pattern: asparagus until you're sick of it, then peas, then peppers, then tomatoes, then corn, then squash, and finally onions, turnips, and potatoes, and the long winter of eating out of your freezer. (Kingsolver doesn't shun modern technology: during the excesses of midsummer, they freeze, can, bottle, dry, and otherwise preserve the abundance of summer foods for the long months of January and February when little grows.) The emphasis is on not shipping food hundreds or thousands of miles to get to you: the emphasis is on eating things that were grown right around the corner.
The one topic about which I found myself torn was what I perceived as her romanticization of farm people. See, I know, intellectually, that what I call 'romanticization' isn't really a fair assessment: Kingsolver lives with farm people, grew up with farm people, isn't portraying them that way out of ignorance or illusion bought by distance. And yet... I grew up in Idaho; I knew farm people, too, and they weren't the close-to-the-earth people she describes. I don't know whether my farm people are unusually far to one side of the scale or hers are unusually far to the other, or both, but I didn't have any frission of recognition when she described the farm people she knew. And I did grow up in a fairly small, ag-heavy town. (Also, while I share her concerns about rampant pesticide use and irresponsible antibiotic use, I think it sometimes trended toward technophobia -- which I am less sympathetic to.) The other potential problem is that the book can seem pretty preachy, which is offputting, especially if you're not already pretty convinced.
The other topic with which I found problem is the inherent privilege (yeah, I used the p-word) of the position. It'd be great if everyone could take the time and money to attend farmer's markets and cook their own food from scratch. I do it. But I'm acutely aware that I have, comparatively, a fair bit of money and a fair bit of time. A lot of people are pressed for one or both, and I think that any long-lasting solution to food-system problems is going to have to address the people who honestly can't afford (in time or money) much better than mac-n-cheese and chicken nuggets -- and/or who live in poor urban areas where local food is just plain not available. These problems need solving too, and pretending that they can be solved if the very poor will just try harder is not tenable.
But. But, in general, I really appreciated this book. It deals with a topic that's close to my heart: mindful domesticity. I sometimes feel that I'm slacking -- I spend, some days, upwards of an hour preparing my dinner, and it's a pleasure for me, but sometimes it feels like a bit of frivolity. ("I'd love to do that," friends say, "I'm just too busy," and I wonder if it reflects badly on me that I'm not too busy, that I can spend an hour making soup or roast or casserole, if I want.) It was delightful to read a book that reveled in the same kind of deliberate attention to food that I take pleasure in day-by-day.
The book contains between-chapter essays written by Kingsolver's older daughter. I hate to say this, because it sounds really judgmental, but she writes like an extremely literate nineteen-year-old. (Not a slam: she was nineteen when the book was published.) Which is to say, the inter-chapter bits are entirely readable, but the prose is a little bit, well, purple. This is made up for with great recipes in those sections, however.
Do be aware: the family in the book were not vegetarians for the duration, though they only bought local meats. In fact, they began a breeding flock of heritage turkeys -- and, in due course, slaughtered all but two of the male turkeys for meat for the freezer. (Too many males leads to infighting in the flock.) The females lived to breed another generation. (They also had a breeding flock of chickens, though, while the turkeys were bred mostly for meat, the hens were bred for egg-laying -- but the excess roosters also were slaughtered for food.) I respect that a great deal -- I do feel that, if I'm going to eat meat, I need to be willing to fully face my choice to end an animal's life for my own sustenance -- but the chapter about the turkey slaughter is a little gruesome. I wasn't bothered, but you might be -- especially the vegetarians out there.
But I keep diverging into qualifiers, and that's not really fair to the book. In a lot of ways, it swept me up into the pleasures of food: from planting and harvesting (it really made me long to have a big garden; her chapter on having a plethora of tomatoes to eat, dry, and can filled me with acute jealousy) to using and cooking. And I love food, love taking home a really beautiful bunch of purply-orange carrots and figuring out what to do with them, chopping them for mirepoix or glazing them with ginger and dill or slicing them for chicken soup. I just do. I love it. And the book gave me the most joy when it reminded me why.
Again: if you aren't already a pretty progressive liberal, this book is not going to convince you to become one. But if you are one, the book might convince you to become a progressive liberal who's also interested in the politics and ecology of food (even if you don't go to quite the same lengths -- as I'm not going to; no giving up lemons and limes for me). At any rate, I found it really fascinating -- and though I'm unlikely to eat nothing but local for a whole year (as interesting as the experiment may be), it inspired me to continue with my high proportion of local produce, even through the long and squash-filled winter.
(Also, now I want chickens of my own. Darn you,
triath, for putting the idea in my head in the first place.)(I'd now like to go on to read Plenty: Eating Locally on the 100-Mile Diet
, by a Canadian couple who don't 'cheat' with non-local wheat flour, coffee, or anything like that. For one thing, I'm curious how one manages with an even more hardcore locavore diet; for another thing, their location -- British Columbia -- is even more like Seattle than Virginia is. The comparison ought to be fascinating.)![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-01-14 07:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-14 02:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-15 02:05 am (UTC)I don't want to eat locally, but I would like to eat more in season. Going to the Farmer's market can help some with that -- at least I know what's in season locally. It's funny, I will make (on weekends) complex dinners, and bread, but it's hard to find the time to go to a market right now. Maybe in the spring or summer it will seem more like a fun weekend outing for us all.