Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Brace yourselves, I think this is going to be a long post!

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver

I bought Animal, Vegetable, Miracle after seeing it reviewed on a few blogs.  When I was in high school I read a few of Barbara Kingsolver’s books (I still haven’t read the Poisonwood Bible, but I will soon!) and enjoyed them, so I figured this book would be right up my ally.  Great writing and a book about food?! Heck yes!

I decided to save the book for my week-long vacation to New Hampshire, so I could dive right in insted of reading little bits at a time.  Well, that vacation was last week and I’m happy to report that I absolutely loved the book.  The setting was perfect too: a beautiful New England lake house, with views like the one below:

The book chronicles Kingsolver’s family decision to move to Appalachia and eat only what they grew themselves or could be found locally for one year.  What an undertaking!  The book is filled with factual accounts of food production, from the home grown vegetables to factory farming, as well as stories about the challenges and successes the family faced.  Chapters are supplemented with anecdotes and information from Kingsolver’s daughter and husband.

What I found so interesting was her description of vegetable seed producers/engineers.  Kingsolver explains the difference between heirloom vegetable seeds and the seeds that most of us buy from major corporations and that turn into the fruits and vegetables that we eat.  She explains that there are very few seed providers, and those that do supply seeds have come up with ways to genetically manipulate the seeds so they grow heartier at the cost of nutrients, and have a “terminator” gene that doesn’t allow for farmers to save seeds to be replanted for future crops.

Additionally, and perhaps most interesting to this intellectual property loving law student, producers of these seeds have intellectual property protections on the specific genetic formation of their seeds.  Companies like Monsanto have successfully sued farmers for unlawfully “growing” the company’s seeds when the seeds inadvertently blew onto that farm from another farm authorized to use the seeds.  Unbelievable!

Kingsolver also talks about the problems with factory farming that most of us know by now: foods shipped to your supermarket from other parts of the country and other parts of the world use an unbelievable amount of fossil fuels, at the risk of our environment.  Those tomatoes you find at the supermarket in the middle of winter taste like garbage because they are so artificially ripened that they aren’t really even tomatoes yet.  Factory farms put out products more cheaply than neighborhood farms, and as a result the once booming farming population in the United States has declined at an alarming rate.

The book discusses the challenges of growing your own food, too.  Bananas and avocados don’t grown around Appalachia.  Crops require a tremendous amount of attention and hard, manual labor.  Vacations simply aren’t possible for many farmers for this reason.  Eating only locally certainly means sacrificing some of ones favorite foods, and eating some of the same foods over and over again simply because they grow well in your area.  Kingsolver deals with the latter dilemma by providing some wonderful sounding recipes right in the book, as well as on her website.

Now, I understand that this is a work  of a fiction writer, and that it certainly is not the definitive guide to the perils of factory farming, but I think the best part of the book is the awareness it brings to those that read it.  Personally, I intend to read a lot more on the subject in order to better inform myself.

I highly recommend you look up this book and visit the website.