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Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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  • From: yarrow@sfo.com
  • To: Healthy soil and sustainable growing <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] why sustainable growing/ was Texas
  • Date: Tue, 15 May 2007 18:38:38 -0700

Here's a family that sourced a year's food within *10 miles* -- it can be done if you pick your location carefully.

In the local paper, the nonfiction bestseller list had 3 books on eating locally.

From: reviews@powells.com
Subject: Review-a-Day: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

Today's Review From
Christian Science Monitor

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
by Barbara Kingsolver and Camille Kingsolver and Steven L. Hopp

A Year of Eating Locally in 'Animal, Vegetable, Miracle'
A review by Marjorie Kehe

If you live in North America and cherish the seemingly innocent
pleasure of slicing a banana over your cereal in the morning,
think twice before picking up Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year
of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver. For afterward that pleasure
will never be innocent again.

"Each food item in a typical U.S. meal has traveled an average
of 1,500 miles," writes Steven L. Hopp, Kingsolver's husband,
in the first of a series of sidebars sprinkled throughout her
book. "If every U.S. citizen ate just one meal a week (any meal)
composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce,
we would reduce our country's oil consumption by over 1.1 million
barrels of oil every week."

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is the story of how the Kingsolver-Hopp
family moved from Tucson, Ariz., to southern Appalachia in a conscious
attempt to liberate themselves from industrial food. They would
eat only, they decided, what they grew themselves or what was
grown by others within 10 miles of their home. They were seeking,
Kingsolver writes, "an affinity between people and the land that
feeds them."

This may sound like a pretty crunchy read -- either a frivolous
ecofantasy or an uncomfortable scold aimed at those of us unable
or unwilling to raise chickens in our backyards. But rest assured,
it's neither.

This is largely an informational book, short on plot, and don't
expect any deep insights into the Kingsolver-Hopp family. Yet
Kingsolver, author of bestselling novels Bean Trees and Poisonwood
Bible, adds enough texture and zest to stir wistful yearnings
in all of us who have "lost the soul of cooking from [our] routines."
Very sweetly Kingsolver reminds us of "the song of a stir-fry
sizzle, the small talk of clinking measuring spoons, the yeasty
scent of rising dough, the painting of flavors onto a pizza before
it slides into the oven." There is no shortage of that kind of
soul in the Kingsolver-Hopp home, and readers will enjoy the vicarious
taste of domesticity that comes with descriptions of crusty homemade
bread topped with (yes, really) homemade cheese.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle begins with the family leaving Tucson
("a space station where human sustenance is concerned") and follows
them through their first year of life as "locavores" in their
new home in Virginia. (Kingsolver's "year" begins, naturally,
in the spring when the asparagus blooms.)

The book wends its way through the discovery that rhubarb can
substitute for fruit in the early spring, the purchase of the
poultry flock to be enthusiastically tended by 9-year-old Lily
Kingsolver, mulching, cheese-making, tomato-canning, and eventually,
the day on which the poultry will be "harvested."

This, too, the Kingsolver-Hopps do themselves (at least when it
comes to their chickens and turkeys -- they buy lamb locally.)
"You can leave the killing to others and pretend it never happened,"
says Kingsolver, "or you can look it in the eye and know it."

This coming from the mother of Lily, a girl who has to be told
not to kiss her hens on the mouth and who assures her mother,
"If I love my chickens six, I love you seven."

Lily, in fact, emerges as a particularly appealing character,
a plucky, pragmatic, young entrepreneur who lavishes care on her
flock even as she keeps her eye fixed firmly on the horse she
hopes her egg earnings will one day buy her.

Like the carefully prepared meals described throughout, the book
is a family affair. Husband Steven, a biology professor, provides
sidebars on world hunger, global food distribution, genetically
modified food, and pesticides. College-age daughter Camille --
who is no slouch as a writer, either -- introduces recipes complete
with a teenager's view of what it's like to have parents who view
out-of-state fruit as contraband material and who embarrass you
by making turkey sausage in front of your friends.

But perhaps what's most appealing about this book is the love
that holds its disparate parts together: love of family, love
of good food, love of the planet, and the willingness to expend
extra effort to safeguard these treasures.

If you subtract out the labor involved, the life of a locavore
is an inexpensive one. Kingsolver estimates that during the year
chronicled in Animal, Vegetable, Mineral her family ate "organically
and pretty splendidly we thought" for about 50 cents per person
per meal.

But of course the cost was never the point. "In April I'm happiest,"
Kingsolver writes, "with mud on the knees of my jeans, sitting
down to the year's most intoxicating lunch: a plate of greens
both crisp and still sun-warmed from the garden, with a handful
of walnuts and some crumbly goat cheese."

This, Kingsolver tells us, "is the opening act of real live food."
It's hard not to be impressed.

Marjorie Kehe is the Monitor's book editor.

Read the review online at:
http://www.powells.com/n/217/csm/review/2007_05_14




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