Book Review: Animal Vegetable Miracle
Written largely as an autobiographical narrative, Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Vegetable Miracle is a beautiful way to package information about eating right for the environment. Kingsolver, and her family (who co-wrote the book with her) decide to move from city to country and commit to documenting their experiences eating locally and organically for one year.
Kingsolver’s work provides cold, hard, your-body-and-the-environment-are-being-destroyed-by-what-you-eat facts. Between diverse and delicious vegetable recipes, stand truths about how much it costs financially and environmentally to transport bananas to the North Americans who eat them, about animals that never see the sun before ending up on our dinner plates, about genetically modified tomatoes that barely resemble the original fruit. But the facts are ugly realities amid palatable text that leaves us hungrily turning pages. The work has a pastoral feel. We imagine the smell of mushrooms picked in the spring, the fleshy tomatoes crushed into sauce, the cool air of the morning farm.
And while Kingsolver is earnest about eating locally and organically, she isn’t militant. Like all of us, she has her indulgences. But rather than appearing hypocritical, Kingsolver’s addition of Italian wine to her dinner table makes her seem more human, and her message more accessible. The implication of the book isn’t that you are a horrible person if you eat fruit from Costa Rica every once and a while. Rather, it urges the reader to think before eating, to realize what certain foods cost our bodies, the economy, and the environment when we eat them. I finished reading Kingsolver’s book in the nadir of winter. Black nights gave way to grey days, and nothing was growing. I switched to buying free-range, antibiotic-free meat from the local Loblaws and to making every effort to buy my veggies and fruits locally and organically. After such resolutions, my expeditions to the grocery store produced parsnips, rutabagas, beets and potatoes. And the hunt was on for comfort food recipes with which to transform my purchases. Nothing beats shepherd’s pie, cumin and nutmeg spiced stew or sauerkraut, sausages and potatoes. Nothing, that is, except summer.
And this summer, I hardly saw the inside of a grocery store. Instead, my two year old son and I feasted on whatever looked good at the farmer’s market each week. I adopted three farmer’s markets as my own, and depending on what transpired in a given week, I visited the one that was open at the time most convenient for me.
We spent languid sunny afternoons wandering amid the stalls looking for food treasures: a block of Romano cheese rife with peppercorns, orange cherry tomatoes that tasted earthy and sweet as grapes, bread made in outdoor ovens in a park twenty minutes from home. This summer brought me radishes the size of my fist, handfuls of perfect-for-snacking green and yellow beans, and the joy of watching my son grinning at the kitchen table as he ate (and covered himself with) our find of locally produced and pesticide-free burgundy berries (like raspberries only darker, more fragile, and sweeter). Our lunches were cheese and meat and vegetables spread before us in all their delicious and colourful glory. I felt healthy and deeply satisfied sharing such bounty with my boy.
Since reading the book I have also felt more responsibility to my son, knowing that the decisions I make now in terms of eating and the environment will directly affect his life, his health, and his ability to provide his loved ones with the riches of our earth when he is as old as me. I watch him eating the last of the season’s tomatoes, trying his hand at corn on the cob swathed in butter, and exclaiming over the pumpkins beginning to appear on the porches of houses in our neighbourhood. On these fall evenings, after work and daycare, we sometimes go for walks. We breathe in the cool air in which our food is completing its season of growth—dying or falling asleep under the leaves and snow until next spring. I hold my little boy’s hand and I am thankful for the time we spend together, for the beauty of our changing seasons, and for the food we choose to eat.
Thanks to Christine Mensinga, a friend and public school teacher, for her excellent review.
