Veggie Crazy

Barbara Kingsolver took her family from sunny, parched Tucson to a vegetable patch in the hills of Virginia, then invited them to write a book with her about it. The result is Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life.

There are no miracles in the book, unless you consider the fact that her family didn't go at each other's throats with paring knives. Nor is there much real drama. Kingsolver is a hobby farmer, so she never faces the economic dangers full-time farmers do. However, there are some farm animals and lots, and lots, of vegetables. Kingsolver and her family resolved to live an entire year eating only food they've grown themselves, or at least eating as locally as they can. Now that the eat local ethos of Chez Panisse has merged with the green movement, it's a well-timed experiment. Besides, it's starting to look like Tucson is locked in an epochal drought, so it was time to head for the hills.

The family makes it through the year without starving to death, although the eldest daughter Camille departs for college after five months. They generally eat enviously well, but there are lean times, such as the first months in spring, when the Kingsolver/Hopp enterprise is still in start up mode and all they have to eat are asparagus. (Kingsolver correspondingly devotes an entire chapter to this vegetable.) Mid-winter is also rough, as one can imagine. Even mid-summer has its challenges. When the farm sprouts squash and weeds in overwhelming abundance, the family goes a little veggie crazy, so they take a hastily arranged trip up north, where, somewhat to Kingsolver's chagrin, she finds people engaged in the same venture as she is, only more successfully.

During the year we get lots of descriptions of vegetables, along with a matter of fact account of a chicken slaughter. Her daughter Camille offers asides that, in some ways, make for the best reading of the book. Camille writes with less flair than her mother, but also less cant. Kingsolver is a local food evangelist, and as such she can be wearisome at times, even when you agree with her. She's appalled at our eating habits, as well she should be, and you won't look at the vegetable aisle in the supermarket the same way again. She's at her best when she's the most local. A Kentucky native, Kingsolver knows that the small farms of Appalachia need high-value crops to make them viable--hence the tenacity to which Southern farmers clung to tobacco. After chopping the heads off a few chickens she's earned the right to take issue with the sanctimony of vegetarians. On the other hand, she ventures to Italy to tell us we should live like Italians, as if we needed to be told that. The picturesque agriturismo she visits grows its own food, but she never ventures into town where ordinary Italians shop. Every farmers market in Tuscany I've ever visited sold only tomatoes from the Netherlands. 

Kingsolver is less interested in turning us all into truck farmers than into better consumers, so it was interesting to read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle immediately after reading Tyler Cowen's Discover Your Inner Economist. Both authors are ardent foodies, but they're on opposite sides of the nature/culture divide.  Kingsolver is militantly local, trusting only the soil beneath her feet, while Cowen wants us to consume everything on the globe. And yet, in their own ways, they're both essentialists. For Kingsolver, the totemic object is a garden-grown spear of asparagus; for Cowen, it's a food cart in Singapore.

The "local" and the "authentic" are concepts that break down under analysis. Is red snapper prepared Veracruz style, for instance, authentic when it's served in a Mexico City restaurant? What about all those Dutch tomatoes in Tuscan pasta dishes? I had a revelatory bowl of black bean soup in Isla Mujeres, Mexico, but I've also had a pretty fantastic bowl of black bean soup at Rick Bayless's Frontera Grill in Chicago--prepared, like a lot restaurant food in the United States, by a Mexican kitchen staff. For thousands of years the local meant whatever you could squeeze from the earth; the authentic was whatever was available to you. Kingsolver herself dolefully notes that nowadays rural Americans eat the same junk suburbanites do.  Eating local and global are luxuries of an urbanized bourgeoisie. The local and the authentic are empty concepts unless you live near a well-stocked grocery store full of mass-produced food. That said, for all their absolutism, Kingsolver and Cowen offer a valuable lesson: there's a better way to eat. We should all eat local, and we should all eat global, but we should keep in mind that age-old advice about eating: everything in moderation.