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Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
by Barbara Kingsolver

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<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25460.Animal_Vegetable_Miracle_A_Year_of_Food_Life?utm_medium=api&amp;utm_source=blog_review" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life" border="0" src="http://s3.amazonaws.com/photo.goodreads.com/books/1167733922m/25460.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25460.Animal_Vegetable_Miracle_A_Year_of_Food_Life?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3541.Barbara_Kingsolver">Barbara Kingsolver</a> 
 <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/16781949?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review"><h3>My review</h3></a>
 rating: 5 of 5 stars By the way, I accidentally clicked that I "liked" this other person Camille's review. I didn't. 
 
 I give this book 5 stars because its cause is very close to my heart. It is an excellent primer for sustainable, local food sourcing: it provides a good overview of the issues (including problems faced by small farms and the many dangers to global food supply and health posed by the industrial food complex) and a plan for gradually incorporating local and sustainable foods into your life (small steps, recipes, food plans, resources for learning more, and advice for approaching farmer's markets, CSAs, and even your supermarket). It covers the reasons why the country's foodways face imminent disaster, how you can help, and, most importantly for newbies, the many, many pleasures that can be had from responsible eating.
 
 Barbara Kingsolver chooses to take as pleasant, nonjudgmental and nondidactic approach as one can take to such important topics, because she is hoping to persuade people who are ignorant of or hostile to the issues. That's a pretty good approach for the book, though you can see from some of the reviews on this site that it wasn't even tolerant enough for people who don't want to take the trouble to learn or to change. (E.g., the person who thought she was scoring against BK by claiming that the gas she'd use driving to the farmer's market justified her buying industrial food instead. Clearly, someone wasn't able to tot up the gas miles involved in industrial food--or, for that matter, to read the sidebars that totted it up for her. I'd LIKE to think she was ignorant, and not just a defensive jerk.) 
 
 But I really do not have time for people who have the power, education, and means to do and know better, but can't take the trouble to do it. I include myself in that judgment: there are plenty of times I choose industrial food over sustainable--because I'm working too hard, broke, tired, craving Lays potato chips--but these are feeble excuses--and they are *immoral*. If you consider yourself a Democrat, liberal, environmentalist, humanist--or for that matter, a conservative who cares about the future of his or her children--you simply cannot rely on industrial food--including organic industrial food--for the majority of your diet. It is wrong, and there's no way to get around it. It was wrong to support the Iraq war (did anybody follow the news a few years ago that it has been made illegal in Iraq to save seeds? Iraqi farmers have been doing it for like thousands of years, growing crops from seed saved from previous harvests. But the U.S. has introduced a number of patented GM seeds, making U.S. farmer's aid dependent on use of the patented seeds, and made it illegal to save them. This creates a dependency on further purchases of seeds, as well as the chemicals needed to sustain them, and endangers nearby farmland that *hasn't* bought seed but gets contaminated by cross-pollination. We know that this has already happened on a huge scale in the U.S.), it was wrong to vote for Bush, and it is just as wrong to do most of your shopping at the supermarket--including Whole Foods--when you have alternatives--and in New York, at least, we DO have alternatives. It makes me furious to see this happening, and to do it myself when I lapse, in a way that should be more common--we should be angry, and we should talk about it, and we should not let ourselves off the hook. So obviously I'm passionate about this.
 
 Oh, back to the book. So, I think it's an important book, and I have Kingsolver's essay "Lily's Chickens" to thank for introducing me to these issues a few years ago. I learned some useful things abut aspects of food policy with which I was unfamiliar, and a lot of gardening tips. And I found it inspiring, and guilt-inspiring in a GOOD way, that is, the way that makes you change for the better, and not the way that makes you whine about how you have good reasons for being the way you are and that it's unfair of other people to expect you to change....anyway, I've already improved my buying habits since starting the book. But because I'm familiar with some of the material already, some things did stand out to me as mistakes. Her arguments about the bias against rural people, and her explanation of rural hostility to newcomers and difference as a protection against exploitation, were interesting and compelling, but her failure to acknowledge that we are not all white middle-clsas families, and that our "difference" can be construed in entirely different ways, as indeed a failure. (I'm not saying that only country people are racist or homophobic. But you can't defend the hinterlands as protective of some kind of essential American identity and not mention stuff like, oh, Matthew Shepard.) Her arguments in favor of meat eating, when she concentrated on the environmental benefits of sustainable grazing in nonarable land, were very good; they were NOT good when she defended meat eating as part of "civilization," and therefore okay. I mean, really. And finally, Kingsolver's prose style is very nearly unbearable: florid, inapt, laden with some of the most tortured similes you will ever read. It's a good idea never to read the first two paragraphs of any of her books, because her openings are always the worst things she writes. She needs to find a better editor, someone who has a red pen. (Her husband, Steven Hopp, writes the side essays with the numbers and the policy; they're very good. Camille, her daughter, writes the recipes and food plans; her writing can be a little florid too, but she had the excuse of being nineteen.) And that's too bad, because it does a disservice to the issues.
 <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/71127?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">View all my reviews.</a>

Alison's review
rating:

By the way, I accidentally clicked that I "liked" this other person Camille's review. I didn't.

I give this book 5 stars because its cause is very close to my heart. It is an excellent primer for sustainable, local food sourcing: it provides a good overview of the issues (including problems faced by small farms and the many dangers to global food supply and health posed by the industrial food complex) and a plan for gradually incorporating local and sustainable foods into your life (small steps, recipes, food plans, resources for learning more, and advice for approaching farmer's markets, CSAs, and even your supermarket). It covers the reasons why the country's foodways face imminent disaster, how you can help, and, most importantly for newbies, the many, many pleasures that can be had from responsible eating.

Barbara Kingsolver chooses to take as pleasant, nonjudgmental and nondidactic approach as one can take to such important topics, because she is hoping to pe...more By the way, I accidentally clicked that I "liked" this other person Camille's review. I didn't.

I give this book 5 stars because its cause is very close to my heart. It is an excellent primer for sustainable, local food sourcing: it provides a good overview of the issues (including problems faced by small farms and the many dangers to global food supply and health posed by the industrial food complex) and a plan for gradually incorporating local and sustainable foods into your life (small steps, recipes, food plans, resources for learning more, and advice for approaching farmer's markets, CSAs, and even your supermarket). It covers the reasons why the country's foodways face imminent disaster, how you can help, and, most importantly for newbies, the many, many pleasures that can be had from responsible eating.

Barbara Kingsolver chooses to take as pleasant, nonjudgmental and nondidactic approach as one can take to such important topics, because she is hoping to persuade people who are ignorant of or hostile to the issues. That's a pretty good approach for the book, though you can see from some of the reviews on this site that it wasn't even tolerant enough for people who don't want to take the trouble to learn or to change. (E.g., the person who thought she was scoring against BK by claiming that the gas she'd use driving to the farmer's market justified her buying industrial food instead. Clearly, someone wasn't able to tot up the gas miles involved in industrial food--or, for that matter, to read the sidebars that totted it up for her. I'd LIKE to think she was ignorant, and not just a defensive jerk.)

But I really do not have time for people who have the power, education, and means to do and know better, but can't take the trouble to do it. I include myself in that judgment: there are plenty of times I choose industrial food over sustainable--because I'm working too hard, broke, tired, craving Lays potato chips--but these are feeble excuses--and they are *immoral*. If you consider yourself a Democrat, liberal, environmentalist, humanist--or for that matter, a conservative who cares about the future of his or her children--you simply cannot rely on industrial food--including organic industrial food--for the majority of your diet. It is wrong, and there's no way to get around it. It was wrong to support the Iraq war (did anybody follow the news a few years ago that it has been made illegal in Iraq to save seeds? Iraqi farmers have been doing it for like thousands of years, growing crops from seed saved from previous harvests. But the U.S. has introduced a number of patented GM seeds, making U.S. farmer's aid dependent on use of the patented seeds, and made it illegal to save them. This creates a dependency on further purchases of seeds, as well as the chemicals needed to sustain them, and endangers nearby farmland that *hasn't* bought seed but gets contaminated by cross-pollination. We know that this has already happened on a huge scale in the U.S.), it was wrong to vote for Bush, and it is just as wrong to do most of your shopping at the supermarket--including Whole Foods--when you have alternatives--and in New York, at least, we DO have alternatives. It makes me furious to see this happening, and to do it myself when I lapse, in a way that should be more common--we should be angry, and we should talk about it, and we should not let ourselves off the hook. So obviously I'm passionate about this.

Oh, back to the book. So, I think it's an important book, and I have Kingsolver's essay "Lily's Chickens" to thank for introducing me to these issues a few years ago. I learned some useful things abut aspects of food policy with which I was unfamiliar, and a lot of gardening tips. And I found it inspiring, and guilt-inspiring in a GOOD way, that is, the way that makes you change for the better, and not the way that makes you whine about how you have good reasons for being the way you are and that it's unfair of other people to expect you to change....anyway, I've already improved my buying habits since starting the book. But because I'm familiar with some of the material already, some things did stand out to me as mistakes. Her arguments about the bias against rural people, and her explanation of rural hostility to newcomers and difference as a protection against exploitation, were interesting and compelling, but her failure to acknowledge that we are not all white middle-clsas families, and that our "difference" can be construed in entirely different ways, as indeed a failure. (I'm not saying that only country people are racist or homophobic. But you can't defend the hinterlands as protective of some kind of essential American identity and not mention stuff like, oh, Matthew Shepard.) Her arguments in favor of meat eating, when she concentrated on the environmental benefits of sustainable grazing in nonarable land, were very good; they were NOT good when she defended meat eating as part of "civilization," and therefore okay. I mean, really. And finally, Kingsolver's prose style is very nearly unbearable: florid, inapt, laden with some of the most tortured similes you will ever read. It's a good idea never to read the first two paragraphs of any of her books, because her openings are always the worst things she writes. She needs to find a better editor, someone who has a red pen. (Her husband, Steven Hopp, writes the side essays with the numbers and the policy; they're very good. Camille, her daughter, writes the recipes and food plans; her writing can be a little florid too, but she had the excuse of being nineteen.) And that's too bad, because it does a disservice to the issues....less

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