UFPPC (www.ufppc.org) Digging (Dig! Dig! Dig! And your muscles will grow big” —John Raeburn [p.
250]) Deeper LXXX April 27, 2009,
7:00 p.m.
Barbara Kingsolver with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of
Food Life (New York: Harper Perennial, January 2008; original edition May 2007).
[Themes: While eating locally for a year is this
book’s explicit “locavore” theme, the following
sentences indicate many of its larger concerns: “In so
many ways, disaster makes you take stock. For me it
had inspired powerful cravings about living within our
means. I wasn’t thinking so much of my household
budget or the national one but the big budget, the one
that involves consuming approximately the same
things we produce” (234). “Food is not a product but
a process, and it never sleeps” (270).]
Ch. 1: Called Home. Leaving Arizona to take up
full-time residence in North Carolina (1-7). Arrival at
the farm (7-8). Our “drift away from our agricultural
roots”; “We’re a nation with an eating disorder” (13;
18; 8-20). A movement is underway in the U.S. to
restore a “genuine food culture” (20). The
Kingsolver-Hopp family decides to take a year’s
sabbatical from “industrial foods” and “the
agribusiness supply line” (22; 21-22).
Ch. 2: Waiting for Asparagus: Late March. When
to begin (23-24). Asparagus (24-29). Americans no
longer know how to wait for the quality experience
(29-32). The rule: local produce only; each person is
allowed one exception (32-36). Saturday morning at
the farmer’s market (36-39).
Ch. 3: Springing Forward. How our food lost its
taste; in praise of vegetables (43-62).
Ch. 4: Stalking the Vegetannual. Imagining “a
season of foods unfolding as if from one single
plant. . . . We’ll call it a vegetannual”; the point being house (202-05). Uneasy rural-urban relations (205-
that any part of a plant can become a food (63-65).
Americans are now used to eating out of season (65-
69).
Ch. 5: Molly Mooching: April. The Sanford Webb
farm (70-72). Choosing crops; tobacco farming (73-
77). Woodland plants (a Molly mooch is a morel)
(77-80). Planting (80-82).
Ch. 6: The Birds and the Bees. B.K.’s massive
amounts of fan mail (86-87). Bees and chickens in the
mail (87-88). Lily raises chickens; B.K. raises turkeys
(88-99).
Ch. 7: Gratitude: May. Southern manners forbid
saying “thank you” for a plant (100-01). A birthday
party (101-07).
Ch. 8: Growing Trust: Mid-June. June as a period
of calm in the farming cycle; thoughts on farming
(111-18). Gardening in New England (118-21). B.K.
favors local-grown over organic food (121-23).
Ch. 9: Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast.
Thoughts on time (125-30). “Cooking is the great
divide between good eating and bad” (129).
“[C]ooking is good citizenship” (130). The
excitement of making food—in this case, cheese (130-
41).
Ch. 10: Eating Neighborly: Late June. The Farmers
Diner in central Vermont [Barre, VT] serves only
food grown within an hour away (148-53).
Ch. 11: Slow Food Nations: Late June. Québec;
B.K. uses her French (154-58). David and Elsie’s
Amish dairy farm in Ohio (159-69). Camille
promotes organic food (170-72)
.
Ch. 12: Zucchini Larceny: July. Weeding (173-74).
Early vegetable harvest (174-79). The chickens and
turkeys (180-85). Zucchini (185-89). Camille on
summer cooking; cherry sorbet (190-95).
Ch. 13: Life in a Red State: August. Keeping a
gardening journal (196-97). Big tomato harvest (198-
202). Appalachia’s Harvest Collective, a packing
10). Supermarkets imply obliviousness to the
spirituality of food (210-11). Camille on tomato
recipes (212-18).
Ch. 14: You Can’t Run Away on Harvest Day:
September. Harvest day (219-20; this is 2005:
mention of Katrina, 234). Rejection of veganism;
what B.K. really hates are CAFOs (concentrated
animal feeding operations): “To believe we can live
without taking life is delusional” (221; 220-37).
Camille’s reflections on eating meat (238-41).
Ch. 15: Where Fish Wear Crowns: September. A
tourist in Italy, B.K. continues to think about her
garden (242-43). Hopp’s maternal grandparents were
Italian; Italians love food (243-53). Agriturismo:
guest accommodation of an Italian working family
farm (253-58).
Ch. 16: Smashing Pumpkins: October. Cooking
pumpkins for a Thanksgiving celebrated a month early
(259-64). Root crops, esp. potatoes and garlic (264-
70). Autumn and ritual (270-71). Camille on potatoes
(272-76).
Ch. 17: Celebration Days: November-December.
Lily’s “egg enterprise” (277-80). American holiday
food traditions (280-84). Boxing Day, Dia de los
Muertos; hints her family is not Christian (284-91).
Ch. 18: What Do You Eat in January? There’s not
enough about farming in our newspapers and in our
educational system (296-98). Freezing, baking,
canning (298-302). Food security and a widespread
sense of impending disaster (303-05). Valuing the
year’s work (305-08). In January, they’re eating
“everything,” but planning for this in August was
necessary (308-09). Camille on not eating bananas
(310-13).
Ch. 19: Hungry Month: February-March. Aging
friends (315-16). Turkey sex in a comic mode;
incubating eggs (316-31). Camille admits she was in
college half of this year (332-33).
Ch. 20: Time Begins. An invitation to read the book
symbolically (334-35). Reflections on the year,
during which eating locally became a movement (335-
43). “The cure” to our predicament “involves
reaching down into ourselves and pulling out a new
kind of person”; we don’t know how to do it, but not
to attempt it would be “child abuse” (345; 344-46).
Lily’s chicks hatch (347-52).
Acknowledgments. “Everything we’ve said here,
Wendell [Berry] said first, in a quiet voice that makes
the mountains tremble” (353; but B.K. lists only one
of Berry’s books).
References. 3 pp. Only books.
Organizations. 5 pp.
Sidebar Resources. 7 pp. Related to Hopp’s
contributions, which are not listed anywhere in the
book, but are listed here: Agriculture accounts for
17% of oil (5). Industrial farming is inefficient (18-
19). How to find a farmers’ market (37). Genetically
modified foods, proprietary rights, and labeling (50-
51). An argument that buying locally doesn’t hurt
farmers in developing countries much (66-67). Small
farms are more efficient; marketing is their problem
(76). Conventional food is not cheaper when
subsidies and externalities are calculated (117). Plea
to consumers to speak up about local food (152).
Chemicals are not the right approach to pests (164-
65). Any yard can have a garden (180-81). Small
diversified farms are not helped by the Federal Farm
Bill (206-07). Mad cow disease (230-31). The local
food movement internationally (250). Fair trade (262-
63). Making bread with a bread machine (286-87).
Fighting junk food and promoting healthy food locally
through legislation (324-25). “Golden rice” debunked
(338-39). How to figure out if food is local (348-49).
P.S. Insights, Interviews, & More.. About the
Authors. Camille Kingsolver born 1987 in Tucson;
student at Duke (2). Steven Hopp grew up in western
Iowa and has a Ph.D. in animal behavior from Indiana
Univ. (2-3). Barbara Kingsolver was raised in rural
Kentucky. She has an undergraduate and master’s
degrees in biology (DePauw; U. of Arizona). Her first
novel, The Bean Trees, was published in 1987. She
has produced seven more volumes of fiction, as well
as several volumes of nonfiction. In 2000 she was
awarded the National Humanities Medal (3-5). “The
Blessings of Dirty Work,” Washington Post (Sept.
30, 2007). Reflections on the decline in agriculture’s
prestige (6-11). Blurb for The Poisonwood Bible
(12-13). Half-page blurbs for four other books (15-
16). Blurbs for three more books (17).
[Additional notes and remarks. Barbara Kingsolver
was born on Apr. 8, 1955; her father was a physician;
she spent some time in Africa as a child. — She
attended college on a music scholarship (piano). —
A website for the book exists at
www.animalvegetablemiracle.com and a professional
indexer has made a subject index available there.
Style involves interweaving “we,” “I,” and “you”; she
is chatty yet remote; her style is formal but
incorporates many colloquialisms and is studiedly
unpretentious; she talks a lot about her feelings, but in
a detached way (on p. 102, B.K. doesn’t tell us it’s her
50th birthday she’s talking about, though Camille says
so on p. 108). — Characterization is rather odd;
characters, including B.K., never really emerge at all;
the family’s privacy is protected. — Her evasiveness
may have to do with marketing her material in an
American culture of that is hostile to many of her
values (it is easy to find denunciations of her work as
anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-capitalist, anti-
imperialist, eco-feminist, etc.), though she claims that
“I've never spent 10 seconds thinking about success—
20 years ago, or now.” — In this book, despite its of war, corporate crime, and science writers who can’t
highly political theme, she avoids politics almost understand the difference between correlation and
entirely (though on p. 297 we read: “I am sick to death causation”).]