Book review: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

I haven’t been feeling well this week, so in lieu of eating food, I have been reading about it. A while ago, whilst I was pondering what a resilient UK garden would look like, blog reader Audrey asked me if I had read Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which is somewhat of a classic in the local good genre. I hadn’t, so I bought a secondhand copy and started reading.

Kingsolver is a veteran writer of novels, poetry and non-fiction, so it’s no surprise that this is an easy book to read (her sections of it, at least – her husband and eldest daughter also contribute sections). Early on in the book I was entranced, with my writerly eye, with some of her phrases.

The premise is simple. Becoming increasingly concerned with where food comes from, and its impact on human and planetary health, the family uprooted itself from Tucscon, Arizona, to a little farm (more of a smallholding, really) in Appalachia – farming country. After a settling in period where they got to know the local food opportunities, and got the garden up and running, they embarked on a year where they tried to eat nothing but local, seasonal food. The early chapters involve worrying about what, exactly, they will find to eat, a worry that quickly evaporates during trips to the local farmers’ markets. There is the anticipation of the first asparagus spears, or the morel mushrooms that spring up by themselves in a secret location on the farm. There is lots of networking with neighbours and local producers.

Later on it becomes more of a gardening tale, with the hard work of planting, weeding, watering… then harvesting and preserving the bounty. This isn’t a story of drudgery and peasant lifestyles, but rather one of shared labours and shared encounters