While I'm as fond of the planet as the next oxygen-breather, I admit to an uneasy relationship with the environmentally ultra-virtuous. I don't think I'm alone in this.
It's not that I have anything against folks who only put their kids in unbleached cloth diapers, or keep the fossil fuel-mobile garaged while they bike to work, or rinse out their little plastic baggies for reuse; indeed, I truly appreciate their thoughtful efforts to help protect our endangered planet. My resistance does not spring from philosophical disagreement—I'm not one of those global-warming deniers—but from good, old-fashioned guilt, the sense that my own efforts fall far short. My kid eats organic but wore Huggies; my Toyota is pretty fuel efficient but is still on the road perhaps more than it ought to be; I've yet to start bringing my own canvas bag to haul home the week's provisions from Trader Joe's.
So it was with some trepidation that I picked up Barbara Kingsolver's new book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (HarperCollins), an account of the year her family committed to eating only locally produced food. The project grew from the family's concern about the environmental and economic effects of our global food system, which trucks and flies produce, meat and other goods (usually produced by large, environmentally unfriendly corporate growers) around the country and the world, while small, local farmers struggle to stay afloat. For one year, Kingsolver and her family decided, they would eat off the grid, growing their own food (including meat) or buying from local producers, learning to plan their meals around what was in season, not what was on the shelf at the supermarket—in short, she writes, "realigning our lives with our food chain."
They began the experiment shortly after moving from their arid hometown of Tucson, where locally produced food was about as common as a rain cloud ("Like many other modern U.S. cities, it might as well be a space station where human sustenance is concerned," Kingsolver writes. "Virtually every unit of food consumed there moves into town in a refrigerated module from somewhere far away.") to the small Virginia farm they'd owned and summered at for years.
After a few months of settling in, Kingsolver, her husband and their two daughters kicked off their "locavore" project one Sunday in April by paring down the weekly shopping list. "Six eyes, all beloved to me, stared unblinking as I crossed the exotics off our shopping list, one by one," she writes.
What qualifies as "exotic" under the terms of this plan is sobering. "Cucumbers, in April? Nope. Those would need passports to reach us right now, or at least a California license. Ditto for those make-believe baby carrots that are actually adult carrots whittled down with a lathe." And forget about tropical fruits, the pineapples and bananas whose high-mileage trip to your local supermarket makes them what Kingsolver calls "the Humvees of the food world."
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle follows Kingsolver and her family month by month through the year, from the early-season farmer's market where they are delighted to find onions and baby lettuce, turkey sausage and rhubarb, to the bounty days of summer, when their home garden virtually overflows (oh, the zucchini!) to fall, when—like those of our fellow animals who've not become citizens of Fast Food Nation—they begin tucking away supplies of food to get them through the coming winter (albeit with the aid of a freezer).
Kingsolver's husband, Steven L. Hopp, and older daughter, Camille Kingsolver, contribute essays sprinkled throughout the book. Camille offers personal essays about growing up in a family where food choices have meaning, ending each with weekly menu plans and recipes (online at www.animalvegetablemiracle.com) that use in-season ingredients (the zucchini chocolate chip cookie and melon salsa recipes are already on deck in my kitchen).
Hopp, a professor of environmental studies, focuses his essays on the political and environmental effects of the way Americans choose to eat. Chock full of grim facts (Americans account for 5 percent of the world's population but use one-quarter of its fuel; we use almost as much fuel to refrigerate food as we do for driving) and covering topics like the cynical practices of pesticide producers and the exploitation of the Third-World farmers who raise much of the produce sold in the U.S., it's Hopp's contributions that may inspire the guilt-stricken reader to ditch the book and crawl under the covers. Resist that urge: his essays put the family's project into an important larger context, and make it clear that even if you're not ready to go as DIY as they did, you'd be wise to pause and think the next time you start filling up your grocery cart.
That, ultimately, is Kingsolver's point. "This is not a how-to book aimed at getting you cranking out your own food," she writes. For one thing, few families have the resources hers does: their own farm, a book contract that made the long hours pulling weeds somewhat more cost-effective, and kids who, remarkably, prefer fresh fruit over junk food. (Even then, they weren't complete purists; certain items, like pasta and cereal, they couldn't find locally. And, like cast members on Survivor, each member was also allowed one "luxury item": coffee for Dad, spices for Mom, dried fruit and hot chocolate for the kids.)
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is aimed at getting readers thinking about where our food comes from, and what happens to it before it gets to our plates. Along the way, Kingsolver offers plenty of funny, lovely vignettes of appreciation: for the poetry of the short but sweet asparagus season, the clumsy breeding dance of turkeys, the comfort of cooking with friends and preparing family foods that you've known from seed up.
That, ultimately, is what makes Animal, Vegetable a joy to read. Kingsolver is not interested in being a public scold; she, too, laughs at the stereotype of the typical twigs-and-berry Thoughtful Eater, "dreadlocked, Birkenstocked, standing at the checkout with his bottle of Intestinal-Joy Brand wheatgrass juice, edging closer to peer into my cart, reeking faintly of garlic and a keenness to save me from some food-karma error."
Instead, she argues for the pleasures of local eating, of foregoing mealy, tasteless winter tomatoes to wait for the real thing, of eagerly anticipating the long-awaited arrival of each new crop, "celebrating each season when it comes, not fretting about its being absent at all other times because something else good is at hand."
In Kingsolver's food revolution, participants won't just dance—they'll also eat really well. "Doing the right thing, in this case, is not about abstinence-only, throwing out bread, tightening your belt, wearing a fake leather belt, or dragging around feeling righteous and gloomy," she writes. "Food is the rare moral arena in which the ethical choice is generally the one more likely to make you groan with pleasure. Why resist that?"
—mturner@valleyadvocate.com
