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Publishers Weekly (MSL quote), USA
<2008-01-07 00:00>
Starred Review. [Signature]Reviewed by Nina PlanckMichael Pollan is the crack investigator and graceful narrator of the ecology of local food and the toxic logic of industrial agriculture. Now he has a peer. Novelist Kingsolver recounts a year spent eating home-grown food and, if not that, local. Accomplished gardeners, the Kingsolver clan grow a large garden in southern Appalachia and spend summers "putting food by," as the classic kitchen title goes. They make pickles, chutney and mozzarella; they jar tomatoes, braid garlic and stuff turkey sausage. Nine-year-old Lily runs a heritage poultry business, selling eggs and meat. What they don't raise (lamb, beef, apples) comes from local farms. Come winter, they feast on root crops and canned goods, menus slouching toward asparagus. Along the way, the Kingsolver family, having given up industrial meat years before, abandons its vegetarian ways and discovers the pleasures of conscientious carnivory.This field - local food and sustainable agriculture - is crowded with books in increasingly predictable flavors: the earnest manual, diary of an epicure, the environmental battle cry, the accidental gardener.
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is all of these, and much smarter. Kingsolver takes the genre to a new literary level; a well-paced narrative and the apparent ease of the beautiful prose makes the pages fly. Her tale is both classy and disarming, substantive and entertaining, earnest and funny. Kingsolver is a moralist ("the conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners"), but more often wry than pious. Another hazard of the genre is snobbery. You won't find it here. Seldom do paeans to heirloom tomatoes (which I grew up selling at farmers' markets) include equal respect for outstanding modern hybrids like Early Girl.Kingsolver has the ear of a journalist and the accuracy of a naturalist. She makes short, neat work of complex topics: what's risky about the vegan diet, why animals belong on ecologically sound farms, why bitterness in lettuce is good.
Kingsolver's clue to help greenhorns remember what's in season is the best I've seen. You trace the harvest by botanical development, from buds to fruits to roots. Kingsolver is not the first to note our national "eating disorder" and the injuries industrial agriculture wreaks, yet this practical vision of how we might eat instead is as fresh as just-picked sweet corn. The narrative is peppered with useful sidebars on industrial agriculture and ecology (by husband Steven Hopp) and recipes (by daughter Camille), as if to show that local food - in the growing, buying, cooking, eating and the telling - demands teamwork. (May)Nina Planck is the author of Real Food: What to Eat and Why (Bloomsbury USA, 2006).
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. |
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School Library Journal, USA
<2008-01-07 00:00>
Adult/High School–This book chronicles the year that Barbara Kingsolver, along with her husband and two daughters, made a commitment to become locavores–those who eat only locally grown foods. This first entailed a move away from their home in non-food-producing Tuscon to a family farm in Virginia, where they got right down to the business of growing and raising their own food and supporting local farmers. For teens who grew up on supermarket offerings, the notion not only of growing one's own produce but also of harvesting one's own poultry was as foreign as the concept that different foods relate to different seasons. While the volume begins as an environmental treatise–the oil consumption related to transporting foodstuffs around the world is enormous–it ends, as the year ends, in a celebration of the food that physically nourishes even as the recipes and the memories of cooks and gardeners past nourish our hearts and souls. Although the book maintains that eating well is not a class issue, discussions of heirloom breeds and making cheese at home may strike some as high-flown; however, those looking for healthful alternatives to processed foods will find inspiration to seek out farmers' markets and to learn to cook and enjoy seasonal foods. Give this title to budding Martha Stewarts, green-leaning fans of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth (Rodale, 2006), and kids outraged by Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation (Houghton, 2001). - Jenny Gasset, Orange County Public Library, CA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Bunny Crumpacker of The Washington Post's Book World, USA
<2008-01-07 00:00>
If you've ever been lucky enough to eat a tomato in the middle of summer, while it's still warm from the sun, if you've seen a farmer's market filled with fresh produce and happy people, if you've stopped at a farm stand, even (or especially) if it's just a table at the side of the road, you know the difference between the taste of real food and what's sold at the grocery store. But advocates of locally grown produce contend that it's much more than a matter of taste. There's the horror of stockyards and poultry farms and slaughterhouses, and the excessive amounts of energy needed to transport food from one part of the country to another and from the summer of another continent to the winter shelves of our town's stores. But beyond all this, supermarket vegetables and fruits are grown with chemical pesticides and fertilizers and patented modified genes, and supermarket meat comes from animals raised in dense crowds, given hormones and antibiotics (which we in turn swallow), and then killed with abiding cruelty.
To the swelling chorus of concern about the food we grow, buy and eat, add three powerful voices, the authors of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. In a way, the book adds four voices, because its main author - novelist, essayist and poet Barbara Kingsolver - speaks in two tones. One is charming, zestful, funny and poetic, while the other is serious and dry, indeed sometimes lecturing and didactic. Both are passionate and caring.
Kingsolver has written most of the book, describing the year in which her family resolved to eat only food they had grown themselves, or that had grown within a hundred miles of their home, a farm in Virginia. The book's informative sidebars are by her husband, Steven L. Hopp, a biologist. Her daughter, Camille (in college, studying biology), has contributed engaging short essays for each month, accompanied by clear, uncomplicated recipes. (A younger daughter, Lily, was the family CEO of fresh eggs.)
Their remarkable year begins in April, when the first asparagus spears poke up from the ground. Sowing, weeding, watering, picking, canning, preserving and joyful eating follow the calendar, with an overabundance of zucchini in the summer, and the food the family has dried, frozen and canned seeing them through the cold months of winter. When March comes, about all that's left are a few quarts of spaghetti sauce, four onions, one head of garlic and, in the freezer, some vegetables and the last turkey.
The raising of the turkeys is a wonderful story all by itself, from the first fluffy babies to the mating, roosting and hatching of next year's batch. Turkey sex is an amazing saga, no less miraculous - and perhaps even much more so - than our own.
Can we all do this? Probably not. We may not have the necessary time, energy or access to a shared community plot. We may not be blessed with a sufficiently inspired - and happy - family. We may not be willing or able to spend the hot days of August canning all those tomatoes. And we may not have the freezer space (not to mention the barn) required for a year's supply of turkeys and chickens. But all is not lost - unless we continue to lose it at the supermarket where the food we buy contributes to global warming on the long way from wherever it was raised. ("Americans," writes Hopp in a sidebar, "put almost as much fossil fuel into our refrigerators as [into] our cars.") The book offers a host of suggestions to make a difference, and there are lengthy lists of places to go, things to do and Web sites to visit. Alas, the book lacks an index.
This is a serious book about important problems. Its concerns are real and urgent. It is clear, thoughtful, often amusing, passionate and appealing. It may give you a serious case of supermarket guilt, thinking of the energy footprint left by each out-of-season tomato, but you'll also find unexpected knowledge and gain the ability to make informed choices about what - and how - you're willing to eat.
Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. |
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Bookmarks Magazine, USA
<2008-01-07 00:00>
In this very topical memoir, Kingsolver has penned a "heroic story" that demonstrates how "growing your own fruits and vegetables, with people you love, can be as rewarding an experience as any on the face of the earth" (San Francisco Chronicle). It also may mark the first time fresh asparagus has been documented with such rapture. The author's passion and narrative prowess make Animal an entertaining, often page-turning read. Her biologist husband Steven offers pithy sidebars about the politics of sustainable agriculture, as well as advice on how to make a change at home. Eldest daughter Camille supplies simple, nutritious recipes. Their combined efforts resulted in nearly universal praise from the critics.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
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Booklist (MSL quote), USA
<2008-01-07 00:00>
Living the American consumerist's good life in Arizona's desert makes abundantly obvious how everyday existence depends on nearly limitless consumption of fossil fuel. It's not just the ubiquitous automobile guzzling gas. Even more gas is consumed by trucks that must deliver most foodstuffs, since so very little of what Arizonans eat grows locally. Those plants that manage to thrive in the desert fields require irrigation through massive diversion of rivers. Despite their genuine love of life in the Southwest, the Kingsolver family moved back to reconnect with ancestral roots in Appalachia, to a farm that has been in the author's family for years. There they have at least some chance of re-creating a profounder and more intimate relationship with the foods they put on the table. Kingsolver's passionate new tome records in detail a year lived in sync with the season's ebb and flow. Starting with spring's first asparagus, summer's chickens, and the fall's surfeit of vegetables, Kingsolver's family consumes what they and their farming neighbors produce. Writing with her usual sharp eye for irony, she urges readers to follow her example and reconnect with their food's source. To that end, she provides a bibliography, Web sites, and a listing of organizations supporting sustainable agriculture. Mark Knoblauch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved -This text refers to the Audio CD edition.
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P. Grant (MSL quote) , USA
<2008-01-07 00:00>
If you care at all about the food you eat, where it comes from, or how far it travels before reaching your table, this book is a must! Not only is this book informative about our food chain: it contains seasonal recipies that are quick and easy to prepare; ideas for growing your own vegetables, even if you only have a balcony window; it is also a charming read, taking you step by step through the seasons, and as well providing many internet references should you need further information and resources. It made me immediately look up my local farmers market, shun out of season delicacies, and reach for my gardening gloves! I already have pounds of tomatoes and am well into the planning stages of my first ever vegetable plot. I enjoyed this book every bit as much as Barbara Kingsolver's novels. Thank you Ms. Kingsolver. |
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Mary (MSL quote), USA
<2008-01-07 00:00>
Excellent, I'm so glad I read it. I learned so much that helped to be a better gardener and to eat better. Pendleton is a small town surrounded by farms, this book gave me great insight into that advantage. And Barbara is so delightful to read! As a health nut I was re-enforced to go organic, she gave me good ways and reasons to be healthy. |
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Susan (MSL quote), USA
<2008-01-07 00:00>
Barbara Kingsolver is such a good writer, she can entice even lukewarm envionmentalists to listen as she shares her family's adventure with local food dedication. It was inspiring and realistic, encouraging anyone and everyone to take a look at the eating habits of our generation. She is a great writer of fiction, but shows she also handles nonfiction with ease. She is a mentor, my hero, and her family's additions to her story only deepen its earnestness. Recommend it to everyone who is courageous enough to consider their own contribution, however small, to save our land and environment for future generations. |
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J. Cyr (MSL quote), USA
<2008-01-07 00:00>
Although this book is chronologically ordered, each chapter could stand on its own as a wonderful essay. Once again, Ms. Kingsolver shows that her nonfiction is as eminently readable as her novels.
It's too bad that so many younger readers today cringe at the word 'essay,' thinking only of school-assignments, which are all too often fossilized into a stifling five-paragraph foramt. A good essay should follow the speed and form of well-crafted thought, not some writing-"guru" that gets adopted by high-school English departments.
The ability to reach out to varying fields of knowledge, pull it all together, and serve it up in a appetizing fashion - well, the metaphor of 'cooking up a good meal' applies to the good essays of Ms. Kingsolver.
She is perhaps closest in spirit to the Renaissance-essayist Montaigne that the modern world of writers has produced. Montaigne wouldn't have passed ENG 101 in most classes today - too 'rambling,' not 'concise' enough...Fortunately, the tyranny of Freshman English didn't exist during the Renaissance - indeed, the 'Renaissance-man' (or woman!) knew that controlled rambling was the essence of interest, and "Animal Vegetable, Miracle" is the proof of such refreshing thought.
Alas, we can't all live on 40 acres in a temperate zone, but Bravo to Ms. Kingsolver for making people think and for 'walking the walk' in her own life!
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Jenkins (MSL quote), USA
<2008-01-07 00:00>
I had read Barbara Kingsolver's other book(s) and appreciate her style of writing. This book was absolutely amazing and I highly recommend it. It has definitely sparked some new interests (canning, eating foods in season), reinforced some of my other thoughts (organic, sustainable products and local options), and educated me on a whole host of other issues (government involvement, federal initiatives, raising poultry). I find myself at our farmer's market at least twice a week, have discovered different varieties of common produce, and already feel that I am planning ahead for next year. I enjoyed the realistic approach that Mrs. Kingsolver took in explaining her family's variations from others who had tried a similar project/experiment. It inspired me to find the ways that I could make changes without feeling overwhelmed or daunted by the task. |
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