This isn’t the Kingsolver you’ve grown to
love. It’s nonfiction, about herself and family; in fact, it’s
partially written by her husband, Stephen Hopp, a biologist, and her
daughter Camille, who has her mother’s talent. And it’s about
food. It does tell a story — of the family’s exodus from
Tucson, where almost all food is imported and the natural aquifer is going
down so rapidly that, even were there no drought (now going on five years),
the burgeoning city is draining it faster than it can possibly recover.
Their promised land is a small farm they own in southwest Virginia, and
they’ve made a vow to try for a year to live on local produce, to
know where the food came from — to become “locavores”
— and to document their efforts.
The story, beautifully told, takes us through that
year, month by month, what they increasingly grew in their own garden or
raised in their henhouse and turkey shed, where and from whom they obtained
other needed food. They weren’t total purists — they bought
coffee, salt, and, because wheat does not do well in that part of Virginia,
flour for the bread Stephen made daily.
This book is so packed that to review all aspects
would take a New Yorker article and probably has. You’ll remember their
9-year-old’s egg business and her careful accounts, charging her own
family; you’ll find the “Will the turkey eggs hatch?”
climax as thrilling as any novel. And the mating of turkeys will astonish
you and satisfy any prurient interests, should you have such, God forbid.
The authors will be your friends, talking directly to you, sharing as with
their neighbors.
In addition, you’ll learn a lot: A brief
history of national farm policy. Why we stuff ourselves with high-calorie
junk food and then wonder why we’re increasingly fat. The problems
with fad diets. How our corn consumption is mainly in the form of
high-fructose corn syrup — read the labels; it’s bad for us
— and more and more of it is going into bioenergy, which takes
petroleum to process. Every so often come Hopp’s sidebars — the
problems with concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs — I call
them factory farms and have my own book, Chicken
Ten Thousand, published in 1968, about such a
farm); how urbanites with small or no space to garden can still raise some
produce in their homes or yards, or find or start a community garden. And
much more. Camille’s contributions are a teenager’s fresh
comments on local eating, teens at home or at college. Plus she gives
recipes for the meals her mother writes about. She, too, talks directly to
the reader and lets us know that all the recipes can be downloaded at
AnimalVegetableMiracle.com.
The books ends with what they’ve learned
— not just how to eat locally but the reasons for it, how one alters
one’s routines, how it all became easier and less of an experiment
and dinner became just that, dinner; the important — which
they’d known before — of sit-down family meals; the actual
considerably lower cost. Their family food footprint for the year was about
1 acre; current national consumption in the U.S. requires 4.8 acres for a
family of four, and the prediction is, by 2050 the amount of farmland
available per citizen will be 0.6 acres.
Change has to happen. Kingsolver asks, with the scope
of the problem seemingly insuperable, why even try? She writes: “I
know the answer to that one: It’s called child abuse. When my
teenager worries that her generation won’t be able to fix this
problem, I have to admit to her that it won’t be up to her
generation. It’s up to mine. This is a now-or-never kind of
project.” And, if sweeping national change doesn’t happen,
“Small, stepwise changes in personal habits aren’t trivial.
Ultimately they will, or won’t, add up to having been the thing that
mattered.”
This is a book of hope — hope based on action.
There are endpages of valuable references and resources.
Jacqueline Jackson, books and poetry editor of
Illinois Times, is a
professor emerita of English
at the University of Illinois at Springfield.
This article appears in Jul 24-30, 2008.
