Land of Plenty

Eating locally with novelist Barbara Kingsolver.

by Carolyn Wyman

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Published: Apr 24, 2007

Three things as certain as the growing season: 1) that novelist Barbara Kingsolver's next book will explore social issues; 2) that the work will be embraced by book groups; and 3) that when Kingsolver is in town to talk about it, she'll eat at the locally sourced White Dog Café.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (HarperCollins) is not another novel in the order of Kingsolver's mega-selling Animal Dreams and Poisonwood Bible, but a full-length journal about the year Kingsolver and her family spent eating nothing but local foods. Groupies thirsting for details about their favorite author's personal life might be disappointed.

"It's not really about my family," Kingsolver says from her home office in rural Virginia. "It's about the food products of local economies and sustainable agriculture that my family got involved with. Like any good book, this one has characters, a plot and a degree of surprise."

Kingsolver's narrative is supplemented with lockstep sidebars by her scientist husband, Steven Hopp, and teenage daughter/chef Camille. But the most likable character in this politically correct tale is her youngest daughter, Lily, who discovers her inner Donald Trump through the process of raising chickens.

In April 2005, the family agreed to raise its own food and, if that wasn't possible, at least get to know the people who had/did (with occasional cheats for foods that do not grow in Appalachia, like coffee beans and olives). Their Animal, Vegetable, Miracle year was a blur of weed-digging, canning and cheese-making that'll leave even the most inclined-to-imitate readers wondering when they would sleep.

"We're two parents each working at least 40 hours a week," says Kingsolver. "As odious as the idea of canning tomatoes may be to some people, I guarantee you that we spend less time doing it than most people spend watching TV. And we find it more meaningful and valuable.

"The point of this book is not to suggest that everyone start to grow their own food," she continues, "but to help people realize that the food was grown somewhere and to understand some of the processes involved in growing it."

These processes include government subsidies that favor factory farms and the enormous amount of money spent dragging food from one end of the country to the other. In fact, agriculture accounts for about 17 percent of America's oil appetite, Hopp states in one of the book's asides.

Kingsolver says Americans' lack of consciousness about seasonality is a "bizarre moment in history, an aberration made possible [by] the artificially low price of fossil fuel that is not going to last. My kids, when they're my age, are not going to be able to buy blueberries in January."

In other words, Kingsolver believes it's just a matter of time before we're all eating her way. She sees increasing awareness in the many new sustainable agriculture organizations (like the White Dog Café Foundation's Fair Food) and the people who have conducted local eating experiments since she hatched her book idea three years ago. All this bodes well for Animal, Vegetable, Miracle sales and the liveliness of the Q&A that will follow Kingsolver's reading at the Free Library.

The Kingsolver family's exercise ended one year ago this month. The day it ended, they went out to McDonald's for Big Macs — kidding. What really happened: They decided to keep going. "Everyone asks what we missed the most," says Kingsolver, "but it's not like we spent the whole year moping around thinking about all the things we couldn't eat. It became our new menu. You don't walk into a restaurant and talk about all the things you want that aren't there. You choose the things that appeal to you from what they do have."

(cwyman@citypaper.net)

Barbara Kingsolver, Wed., May 2, 8 p.m., $12, Free Library of Philadelphia, Central Branch, 1901 Vine St., 215-569-9700.

 

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