The Saga Begins

My story begins innocently enough. My daughter, Sarah, a high school junior, needed to read a book of her choice for her AP Environmental Science class over Christmas break. She had asked my husband, Peter, for advice about which book on the list of recommended titles she should choose. He enthusiastically endorsed a book by Barbara Kingsolver, called Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. " I haven't read this book, but I've read a lot of Barbara Kingsolver's novels," he said. "She's a great writer. I don't think you can go wrong with her book."

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle tells the story of Kingsolver's and her family's year-long commitment to eat only locally grown foods. They live on a family farm in Virginia where they raise chickens, grow vegetables and tend to a small orchard of fruit trees. Many of their neighbors are also amateur or small professional farmers, so they were in the right place to take this pledge. The book, which includes chapters by her college professor husband , Steven Hopp, and her oldest, college-age daughter, Camille, makes a strong case for eating locally. Kingsolver and family share their strategies for raising, growing, sourcing, and preserving enough local food to survive completely on locally grown foods, even in the dead of winter. As a bonus,  the book includes some of the family's favorite recipes for seasonal, home-grown foods.

We were taking a drive to Maryland and back after Christmas to visit with my in-laws and Peter's sister's family, so Sarah decided to get an audio version of the Kingsolver book. She started listening to the book before our trip, so when we piled into the car and she pressed play at the beginning of the trip, she was already two or three chapters in. 

Our trip to Maryland should have taken 5 1/2 to six hours, but ended up taking more like 8 1/2 hours on this particular day. We listened to Kingsolver, her husband, and daughter reading the book almost that entire time and only got about halfway through. That was less a function of how long the book was, than of Kingsolver's painfully slow and completely humorless reading of her own writing. This is an important lesson when selecting audio books - good writers are not necessarily good readers.

We took a break from the book while we visited with family, but then started it up again on the trip home. By the time we stopped at a New Jersey Turnpike rest stop for lunch we had  spent a total of 11 hours listening to Kingsolver, et al, lecture us about their virtue (and our sins) and we were getting a little slap happy and more than a little irreverent. Sarah was now referring to the author as "Saint Barbara", and as we walked up to Popeye's to order some fried chicken, I toyed with the idea of asking the cashier how they raised their chickens and if the honey in their cello packs was a spring honey or a fall honey.

It was the story of their first chicken kill that almost caused us to stop listening. The slow, deliberate, step by step, description of killing the chicken, draining the blood, and plucking the carcass, was bad enough.  But Kingsolver really lost us when she pondered whether it had been a good idea to invite her neighbors who had lost their child just two weeks earlier to their chicken killing carnival. Sarah piped up from the back seat with an answer. "Seriously? Let me help you with that, Barbara. No! It was NOT a good idea!"

Nonetheless, the message was getting through. The chapters by Kingsolver's husband , Steven Hopp, were particularly compelling. No  extolling of family virtue, just the undeniable facts. He laid out his case: exposure to chemicals and hormones, threatened biodiversity, the huge carbon footprint from food transport, potentially catastrophic crop failures. As I absorbed this information,  it was hard not to recognize that I was letting cost and convenience control my food choices for both myself and my family. With a little more thoughtfulness, I could make choices that would be healthier for us and for the planet.

And so the game began,  Kingsolver - 1, von Euler - 0.