Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver
I probably have enough cookbooks to start my own store and I find it vaguely therapeutic to sit down with five or six at a time, thumbing through them, pondering what to make next. But I’ve never really given much thought to how the ingredients for each recipe arrived at my points of purchase.
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle turned my dinner table upside down. Barbara Kingsolver’s fabulous ode to food is the story of her family’s mission to eat locally – in this instance, on a farm in the southern Appalachians – for a year. It’s also a rallying cry for us to wake up to the pleasures of food. Not the packaged variety so many of us consume in frightening quantities. Not any food we like any time anywhere. But real food in season.
In lesser hands, a book that is part agricultural lesson, part environmental impact statement, part cookbook, part family homily could have been as dry and unsatisfying as a drive-through burger. But with the help of husband Steven L Hopp, whose mini-essays provide intelligent insight into everything from pesticides to fairtrade; daughter Camille, who shares absurdly mature 19-year-old thoughts and recipes; and daughter Lucy, who raises chickens with an entrepreneurial flair not seen in the average eight year old, Barbara has created a degustation menu to savour.
Hooked on asparagus in late March, she takes us from one delectable ingredient after another. Rich, ripe tomatoes bursting with flavour, handmade cheese, cherries falling like manna from heaven, potatoes of all shapes and sizes, hand-reared turkeys roasted to perfection, smashingly good pumpkins. There is such a natural rhythm to this cycle of production that it is a bit like, as Barbara says early on in the book, “a music appreciation course for food”.
Even if you never grow it yourself, getting to know the composers and conductors, she maintains, will improve the quality of the experience. This course reveals the joys of heirloom vegetables and the Ark of Taste, a project helping save the world’s vanishing artisan foods by encouraging you to eat them, the struggles of those trying to earn a living from the land, and some pretty unpalatable facts about industrial farming and modern eating habits.
Animal, Vegetable Miracle makes you laugh. It makes you cry. It makes you angry. And it makes you hungry. Hungry for real food. Hungry to know more.
“Eaters must understand,” Barbara argues, “How we eat determines how the world is used.” Reading her book is a significant step along the way to enlightenment.
