Book Focus

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

Barbara Kingsolver’s sharp humor and fluid prose are in fine form in this chronicle of one year spent by her clan— hubby, two daughters, and herself—growing, canning, and preparing their own food and buying exclusively from producers within a 100-mile radius of their small Appalachian farm. Kingsolver emerges as a champion of the American farmer and unlikely spokesperson for the importance of (homegrown) meat in the American diet.

Part memoir, part cookbook, part compendium of ominous facts (Americans’ flabby lifestyles and poor nutritional choices put us in the odd position of leaving our children a shorter life expectancy than our own), Animal, Vegetable, Miracle joins a growing body of criticism of industrial agriculture and its fuel-reliant delivery system, illuminating the connections between anonymous food production and a host of disastrous food policies and dangerous eating habits.

At its heart, the book is an impassioned plea for a return to a genuine food culture, and a record of how one family made deliberate choices to heal what Kingsolver calls “the American eating disorder” by participating in the local food economy.