At long last, the bestselling author of Small Miracles and The Poisonwood Bible returns with the wise and compelling true story of her family’s adventure to reclaim the food they eat
America has long been a nation of farmers. But within the past several decades, our food supply has become dependent on transportation that burns fossil fuels and on increasingly fewer varieties of vegetables and animals. In a single generation, most Americans have lost their knowledge of agriculture and the natural processes that are a part of our food chain. But while food is cheap we pay for it in other ways, including shorter life spans for our children, argues Barbara Kingsolver.
Determined to integrate their food choices with their family values, Kingsolver and her family moved from suburban Arizona to a rural Appalachia, and embarked on an adventure of realigning their lives with the food chain. Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle follows them through the first year of their experiment.
Told in the compelling voices of the Kingsolver family, it recalls their experiences, and introduces other passionate, committed citizens who are trying to turn the tide in their communities, from organic farmers to members of the Slow Food movement who are doing their best to protect our foods against extinction and return us to a way of life that is better for our health, our wallets, and our environment.
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Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
At long last, the bestselling author of Small Miracles and The Poisonwood Bible returns with the wise and compelling true story of her family’s adventure to reclaim the food they eat
America has long been a nation of farmers. But within the past several decades, our food supply has become dependent on transportation that burns fossil fuels and on increasingly fewer varieties of vegetables and animals. In a single generation, most Americans have lost their knowledge of agriculture and the natural processes that are a part of our food chain. But while food is cheap we pay for it in other ways, including shorter life spans for our children, argues Barbara Kingsolver.
Determined to integrate their food choices with their family values, Kingsolver and her family moved from suburban Arizona to a rural Appalachia, and embarked on an adventure of realigning their lives with the food chain. Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle follows them through the first year of their experiment.
Told in the compelling voices of the Kingsolver family, it recalls their experiences, and introduces other passionate, committed citizens who are trying to turn the tide in their communities, from organic farmers to members of the Slow Food movement who are doing their best to protect our foods against extinction and return us to a way of life that is better for our health, our wallets, and our environment.
At long last, the bestselling author of Small Miracles and The Poisonwood Bible returns with the wise and compelling true story of her family’s adventure to reclaim the food they eat
America has long been a nation of farmers. But within the past several decades, our food supply has become dependent on transportation that burns fossil fuels and on increasingly fewer varieties of vegetables and animals. In a single generation, most Americans have lost their knowledge of agriculture and the natural processes that are a part of our food chain. But while food is cheap we pay for it in other ways, including shorter life spans for our children, argues Barbara Kingsolver.
Determined to integrate their food choices with their family values, Kingsolver and her family moved from suburban Arizona to a rural Appalachia, and embarked on an adventure of realigning their lives with the food chain. Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle follows them through the first year of their experiment.
Told in the compelling voices of the Kingsolver family, it recalls their experiences, and introduces other passionate, committed citizens who are trying to turn the tide in their communities, from organic farmers to members of the Slow Food movement who are doing their best to protect our foods against extinction and return us to a way of life that is better for our health, our wallets, and our environment.
Barbara Kingsolver is the author of ten bestselling works of fiction, including the novels Unsheltered, Flight Behavior, The Lacuna, The Poisonwood Bible, Animal Dreams, and The Bean Trees, as well as books of poetry, essays, and creative nonfiction. Her work of narrative nonfiction is the influential bestseller Animal,Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. Kingsolver’s work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has earned literary awards and a devoted readership at home and abroad. She was awarded the National Humanities Medal, our country’s highest honor for service through the arts, as well as the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for the body of her work. She lives with her family on a farm in southern Appalachia.
Camille Kingsolver graduated from Duke University in 2009 and currently works in the mental health field. She is an active advocate for the local-food movement, doing public speaking for young adults of her own generation navigating food choices in a difficult economy. She lives in Asheville, N.C., and grows a vegetable garden in her front yard.
Steven L. Hopp was trained in life sciences and received his PhD from Indiana University. He has published papers in bioacoustics, ornithology, animal behavior and more recently in sustainable agriculture. He is the founder and director of the Meadowview Farmers Guild, a community development project that includes a local foods restaurant and general store that source their products locally. He teaches at Emory & Henry College in the Environmental Studies department. He coauthored Animal, Vegetable, Miracle with Barbara Kingsolver and Camille Kingsolver.
Barbara Kingsolver is the author of ten bestselling works of fiction, including the novels Unsheltered, Flight Behavior, The Lacuna, The Poisonwood Bible, Animal Dreams, and The Bean Trees, as well as books of poetry, essays, and creative nonfiction. Her work of narrative nonfiction is the influential bestseller Animal,Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. Kingsolver’s work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has earned literary awards and a devoted readership at home and abroad. She was awarded the National Humanities Medal, our country’s highest honor for service through the arts, as well as the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for the body of her work. She lives with her family on a farm in southern Appalachia.
Camille Kingsolver graduated from Duke University in 2009 and currently works in the mental health field. She is an active advocate for the local-food movement, doing public speaking for young adults of her own generation navigating food choices in a difficult economy. She lives in Asheville, N.C., and grows a vegetable garden in her front yard.
Steven L. Hopp was trained in life sciences and received his PhD from Indiana University. He has published papers in bioacoustics, ornithology, animal behavior and more recently in sustainable agriculture. He is the founder and director of the Meadowview Farmers Guild, a community development project that includes a local foods restaurant and general store that source their products locally. He teaches at Emory & Henry College in the Environmental Studies department. He coauthored Animal, Vegetable, Miracle with Barbara Kingsolver and Camille Kingsolver.
Date of Birth:
April 8, 1955
Place of Birth:
Annapolis, Maryland
Education:
B.A., DePauw University, 1977; M.S., University of Arizona, 1981
This story about good food begins in a quick-stop convenience market. It was our family's last day in Arizona, where I'd lived half my life and raised two kids for the whole of theirs. Now we were moving away forever, taking our nostalgic inventory of the things we would never see again: the bush where the roadrunner built a nest and fed lizards to her weird-looking babies; the tree Camille crashed into learning to ride a bike; the exact spot where Lily touched a dead snake. Our driveway was just the first tributary on a memory river sweeping us out.
One person's picture postcard is someone else's normal. This was the landscape whose every face we knew: giant saguaro cacti, coyotes, mountains, the wicked sun reflecting off bare gravel. We were leaving it now in one of its uglier moments, which made good-bye easier, but also seemed like a cheap shot—like ending a romance right when your partner has really bad bed hair. The desert that day looked like a nasty case of prickly heat caught in a long, naked wince.
This was the end of May. Our rainfall since Thanksgiving had measured less than one inch. The cacti, denizens of deprivation, looked ready to pull up roots and hitch a ride out if they could. The prickly pears waved good-bye with puckered, grayish pads. The tall, dehydrated saguaros stood around all teetery and sucked-in like very prickly supermodels. Even in the best of times desert creatures live on the edge of survival, getting by mostly on vapor and their own life savings. Now, as the southern tier of U.S. states came into a third consecutive yearof drought, people elsewhere debated how seriously they should take global warming. We were staring it in the face.
Away went our little family, like rats leaping off the burning ship. It hurt to think about everything at once: our friends, our desert, old home, new home. We felt giddy and tragic as we pulled up at a little gas-and-go market on the outside edge of Tucson. Before we set off to seek our fortunes we had to gas up, of course, and buy snacks for the road. We did have a cooler in the back seat packed with respectable lunch fare. But we had more than two thousand miles to go. Before we crossed a few state lines we'd need to give our car a salt treatment and indulge in some things that go crunch.
This was the trip of our lives. We were ending our existence outside the city limits of Tucson, Arizona, to begin a rural one in southern Appalachia. We'd sold our house and stuffed the car with the most crucial things: birth certificates, books-on-tape, and a dog on drugs. (Just for the trip, I swear.) All other stuff would come in the moving van. For better or worse, we would soon be living on a farm.
For twenty years Steven had owned a piece of land in the southern Appalachians with a farmhouse, barn, orchards and fields, and a tax zoning known as "farm use." He was living there when I met him, teaching college and fixing up his old house one salvaged window at a time. I'd come as a visiting writer, recently divorced, with something of a fixer-upper life. We proceeded to wreck our agendas in the predictable fashion by falling in love. My young daughter and I were attached to our community in Tucson; Steven was just as attached to his own green pastures and the birdsong chorus of deciduous eastern woodlands. My father-in-law to be, upon hearing the exciting news about us, asked Steven, "Couldn't you find one closer?"
Apparently not. We held on to the farm by renting the farmhouse to another family, and maintained marital happiness by migrating like birds: for the school year we lived in Tucson, but every summer headed back to our rich foraging grounds, the farm. For three months a year we lived in a tiny, extremely crooked log cabin in the woods behind the farmhouse, listening to wood thrushes, growing our own food. The girls (for another child came along shortly) loved playing in the creek, catching turtles, experiencing real mud. I liked working the land, and increasingly came to think of this place as my home too. When all of us were ready, we decided, we'd go there for keeps.
We had many conventional reasons for relocation, including extended family. My Kingsolver ancestors came from that county in Virginia; I'd grown up only a few hours away, over the Kentucky line. Returning now would allow my kids more than just a hit-and-run, holiday acquaintance with grandparents and cousins. In my adult life I'd hardly shared a phone book with anyone else using my last name. Now I could spend Memorial Day decorating my ancestors' graves with peonies from my backyard. Tucson had opened my eyes to the world and given me a writing career, legions of friends, and a taste for the sensory extravagance of red hot chiles and five-alarm sunsets. But after twenty-five years in the desert, I'd been called home.
There is another reason the move felt right to us, and it's the purview of this book. We wanted to live in a place that could feed us: where rain falls, crops grow, and drinking water bubbles right up out of the ground. This might seem an abstract reason for leaving beloved friends and one of the most idyllic destination cities in the United States. But it was real to us. As it closes in on the million-souls mark, Tucson's charms have made it one of this country's fastest-growing cities. It keeps its people serviced across the wide, wide spectrum of daily human wants, with its banks, shops, symphonies, colleges, art galleries, city parks, and more golf courses than you can shake a stick at. By all accounts . . .
Called Home 1 Waiting for Asparagus: Late March 23 Springing Forward 43 Stalking the Vegetannual 63 Molly Mooching: April 70 The Birds and the Bees 86 Gratitude: May 100 Growing Trust: Mid-June 111 Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: Late June 124 Eating Neighborly: Late June 148 Slow Food Nations: Late June 154 Zucchini Larceny: July 173 Life in a Red State: August 196 You Can't Run Away on Harvest Day: September 219 Where Fish Wear Crowns: September 242 Smashing Pumpkins: October 259 Celebration Days: November-December 277 What Do You Eat in January? 296 Hungry Month: February-March 315 Time Begins 334 Acknowledgments 353 References 355 Organizations 358 Sidebar Resources 364
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