A year of eating locally in 'Animal, Vegetable, Miracle'

This book follows a novelist and her family in an experiment in love – for family, good food, and the planet.

from the May 8, 2007 edition

Page 2 of 2

Page 1 | 2

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. Send comments to Marjorie Kehe.

1 | Page 2