What I'm Reading This Month
By Nadine Holder
September 2007
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, by Barbara Kingsolver with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver, Harper Collins Publishers, 2007
I knew Barbara Kingsolver was my kind of gal when she wrote: “my idea of a manicure was making sure I had nothing scary under my fingernails.” Her book went immediately onto the New York Times Top Ten bestseller list but I had already purchased it after seeing her on CSpan2 on BookTV. Her book is a description of her family’s life on a West Virginia farm for one year after leaving Tucson and the Arizona drought behind. Their goal was to entirely feed themselves off the work of their own hands and with foods purchased from neighbors for one year.
Their goal was to entirely feed themselves off the work of their own hands and with foods purchased from neighbors for one year.
Their motivation was partly from the book Fast Food Nation where they learned how so many Americans are ruining their health with the food they eat. She had also learned that many billions of gallons of oil are expended in transporting food long distances (with the concurrent loss of food value) - almost as much as is used in family automobiles for transportation. Her name was unknown to me and I discovered that she had written mostly fiction, some poetry and some essays, not my usual reading grazing ground. However I had learned from reading Wallace Stegner (whom I profiled last month) that fiction writers could really be word masters when they tackled reality and could get their point across in a most entertaining way. This book is no exception. It was also interesting to learn that she is mentioned in the book 100 Americans Who are Screwing Up America. She is number 74 - I am still puzzled over why - will have to sneak into the book store and look it up!
Their family consisted of four: Barbara, husband Steven Hopp, 19 year old daughter Camille Kingsolver, and 9 year old daughter Lilly Hopp. Barbara wrote the book, but Steven contributed essays intertwined with Barbara’s work, with some hard core data on U.S. food production, including the overuse of chemicals. Daughter Camille, a very sensible 19 year old, contributed stories of interesting happenings on their farm. Nine year old Lilly did not contribute to the narrative but was in charge of the family chicken and egg food supply, and happily learned the financial reality of self food production.
Having had wonderful gardens here in Sierra Vista before the drought I was in a fit of jealousy during most of the book over their production in West Virginia. I now only have a few chickens and produce a few eggs for my own use and have a sum total of two tomato plants. Barbara wrote of planting 50 tomato plants in West Virginia, with the Arizona mind set that few would survive. The plants all survived and produced nearly a quarter ton of tomatoes. Of course they mostly arrived all at once, resulting in a few weeks of non-stop tomato canning, tomato sauce manufacture and canning, and efforts to palm off tomatoes on unsuspecting friends and neighbors. (A funny comment in the book was that the neighborhood was safe and friendly to the extent that no one
locked their doors except in zucchini season to prevent zucchini being left in the house when people were gone.) But you get the idea of how wonderfully productive the land is. It is very labor intensive as the hills are steep and the farms rugged, so that most of the work is done with shovels and hoes rather than any machinery.
Barbara also wrote of local farmers doing all the work to produce perfect organic tomatoes and finding stores would not buy because California tomatoes were lower in price despite the cost of transportation (including refrigeration.) The transport cost was tax deductible as a business expense and growing and processing the tomatoes was much cheaper in California due to the availability of cheap labor (read illegal labor? My comment). A cost that Western States seldom include but it is a large one, is the cost of moving water to the farm site. So Virginia farmers went bankrupt with piles of beautiful rotting tomatoes. They were able to get some to charities so not all went to waste.
Her comments about their meat production were interesting to me as I am a total wimp and will not raise chickens for slaughter though I had to learn to clean and dress them when I was a kid. Her comment was that they bought animals for slaughter and gave them the best life they could but the animals were not named and not treated as pets and the family knew from the get go which ones would be killed. They did not eat beef as I do not (we raised beef cattle in Wyoming but we never ate beef - after all our cattle all had names and you don’t eat something with a name!) She did mention though that most of her neighbors raised grass fed beef (pastured) as the health benefits are enormous. Barbara describes their chicken and turkey slaughter in fair detail but with scientific information on how it can be done with no pain or stress to the poultry. Doing it is not a pretty picture but it can be done, the idea being to stop brain function immediately. She also explained the health benefit of eggs from free range chickens, which I was already familiar with.
In addition to raising their own chickens they raised turkeys, a whole different proposition, but they ultimately succeeded. Barbara soon found that the current reproduction of turkeys is so mechanized that she could find no information on natural methods. Finally she located some fifty year old manuals and began to figure out the options. As with a lot of males, she found out that plying them with brandy until they were sleepy and placing them on a nest of unfertile eggs, got across the idea of breeding and making fertile eggs.
A fun chapter in the book was a trip to Italy that Barbara and Steven made as a treat for themselves during a lull in the farm work. She has wonderful stories on the Italian relationship with food. Italy was one country I missed while living briefly in Europe and after reading this I am very sorry I missed it.
There is more about the book, about eating naturally, and many recipes on their web site: www.animalvegetablemiracle.com.