[Pil-pc-oceania] Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

[pacific-edge]

Passed on from Sydney Food Fairness Alliance... story of a locavore family,
now in print at your bookstre.

The article below also appeared in today's SMH Essential section.
I am currently reading and enjoying (and learning from) the book, which is
gradually receiving reviews here.  There is also a website
www.animalvegetablemiracle.com <http://www.animalvegetablemiracle.com>  with
recipes and other links (many American.). It is published by Faber and is
$29.95 .
Sally James


Tuesday June 26, 2007
The Guardian <http://www.guardian.co.uk/>

 
Of all the potential hazards that a journalist can expect to confront when
embarking on an interview with one of the world's bestselling novelists,
being sexually molested by a turkey is not one of them. But here we are,
standing in the middle of a field talking about literature, the environment
and the future of America, and all the while Tom, a pumped-up male who must
weigh well over 20lbs, is orbiting me in progressively smaller circles. His
tail feathers are fanned out, he is making an alarming noise similar to a
police siren and is shaking his blood-red proboscis at me - all classic
signals, so I'm told, that he's hitting on me.

This particular beast belongs to Barbara Kingsolver, a writer famous for her
love of nature and of all things rural, whose connection to the land is one
of the qualities that so endears her to her millions of readers. We are at
her farm in deepest Virginia, coddled within a U-shaped mountain ridge in
the Southern Appalachians. There's a stream - or hollow as they call it in
these parts, pronounced "holler" - running down the middle of the
smallholding. The view is of rolling woodland and lush pasture, and in all
directions chickens, sheep and a donkey are milling about. I'd like to
report that it was a place of profound tranquillity, but with all the
braying, cock crowing and turkey sirens blasting it was more like Times
Square on a Saturday night.

Kingsolver, 52, has acquired an enviably long list of bestselling books,
mainly novels but with a sprinkling of poetry and essay collections. She is
best known for The Bean Trees, Pigs in Heaven and, above all, The Poisonwood
Bible, a towering novel set in the Congo that has gained her a massive
global following. It has sold more than two million copies, bears the
imprimatur of Oprah Winfrey, and was recently voted by members of British
book clubs as their favourite novel of all time.

I have travelled down to the Kingsolver farm on the eve of publication of
her latest volume, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. The book marks something of a
departure for her as a writer, as it is her first work of narrative
non-fiction.

To get a sense of what the book is about, think of Super Size Me, Morgan
Spurlock's film in which he spent a month doing nothing but consuming
McDonald's fast food. Now imagine its opposite, and you are getting close to
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Like Spurlock, Kingsolver and her family set
themselves a time-limited task - a year in their case - but instead of
plumbing the depths of America's fast-food culture, their ambition was to
shun it completely. While Spurlock set out to record the damage that would
be inflicted on his own body by eating the equivalent of nine Big Macs a
day, Kingsolver wanted to explore the positive impacts - physical, spiritual
and environmental - of a diet that was wholesome, seasonal and local.

Part of the motivation of the book was repulsion at America's advanced state
of what Kingsolver calls "alimentary alienation", where food is
mass-produced and has little or no bearing on the lives of those who eat it.
With the help of her husband Steven Hopp, an environmental studies lecturer,
she lays out in the book the shocking scale of the crisis. The average food
item on the American shelf has travelled 1,500 miles - further than most
families go on annual holidays. The US consumes about 400 gallons of oil a
year per person for agriculture, a rate of guzzling second only to the car.
And here's a fact straight out of Alice in Wonderland: the US exports 1.1m
tonnes of potatoes, and imports 1.4m tonnes.

The side-effects of America's fast-food culture are legion: global warming
caused by high food airmiles; obesity due to the poor diet, particularly
among American children, who are predicted to be the country's first
generation with a shorter life expectancy than their parents; the
destruction of farming habitats to clear the way for mass cropping of corn
and soya beans; the detachment of millions of Americans who have absolutely
no inkling of what they are consuming or where it comes from. As Kingsolver
sums it up: "Woe is us, we overfed, undernourished US citizens. We are a
nation with an eating disorder, and we know it."

But there is also a positive narrative to the book, a desire to scratch her
itch for earthiness that is rooted, she says, in her childhood in rural
Kentucky. She has hung on to that link with the soil of her formative years
ever since, through college in Indiana, where she studied biology, and
almost three decades living in Tucson, Arizona, a city of a million people
plonked in a desert. "I've never really lost contact with the land," she
says, her words interrupted periodically by bursts of Tom's lustful siren.
"The real places for me were always outside the concrete. I've never been
able to go for a day without thinking that I'm an animal, and an animal is
dead without its habitat and food chain."

So in 2005 Kingsolver and crew - her husband and two daughters Camille, 19,
and Lily, 10 - upped sticks from Tucson and moved to Virginia, where Steven
already owned a small farm of about 100 acres, most of it woodland and steep
hills.

They drew up a plan for a year living as "locavores" - eating food that they
had either grown themselves or had bought from the surrounding area. "We
weren't rule bound, we didn't draw a line in the map," she says, keen to
avoid any impression of preaching or fanaticism. "We wanted to do something
that almost everyone could relate to at some level - to take the approach of
a normalish American family and see what they could do. Not to be heroic or
explore a human extreme, but to show that this was doable."

They were on a trip to find a "real" American culture of food, and the book
is the chronicle of that journey. Some of it is about the deprivation they
endured - the foregoing of bananas and pineapples, for instance, which are
banned on the grounds that exotic fruits are the Humvees of the food world.

But most of the book is devoted to the joys of what they experienced, as the
year unfolded. March, when the "project", as Kingsolver calls it, began, was
the month of asparagus, eaten the very day it was cut. April was for baby
lettuces and greens; June for cherries, the first sweet taste of fruit after
months of abstinence from exotics. With July came an outpouring of new
potatoes, cucumbers and aubergines; and August saw them drowning in tomatoes
of many different varieties, her favourite being the Dolly Partons. On
Thanksgiving, the dining table was piled high with food that was grown or
reared on the farm - including one of Tom's progeny roasted for the occasion
- with the exception of cranberries, which they allowed themselves to
purchase from further north. Even in the depths of January they got by, with
kale and chard, frozen pesto and cans of tomatoes prepared before winter set
in.

There was no slump into winter madness, like Jack Nicholson in the Shining.
If anything, Kingsolver says she felt rather guilty that it all went so
smoothly. "One of the challenges constructing the book was that it was
almost too easy. Where is the suspense?"

Yet reading the book, you could not accuse the locavore of leading a bland
or dull life. Even on the morning we come to the farm, Kingsolver has been
up since 4am, woken by the harrowing sounds of a racoon breaking into the
chicken coop and killing two birds. Later, we stumble on the bones of a
turkey - the dug-up remains, it transpires, of Mother Number One, their
first breeding turkey and Tom's original mate, who came to a sticky end last
week in the jaws of a coyote.

If abundance was the over-arching theme of their year, death was never far
away either. They were careful not to give their animals names, so that when
the day came to "harvest" them they could do so without squirming. (A few
cherished animals slipped through that injunction: notably Sally the donkey
and Opal the Icelandic sheep.) Kingsolver describes in the book with almost
clinical detachment the process of cutting off a rooster's head, and the way
the wings flap afterwards with the body spewing blood.

It is hard to imagine this globally renowned novelist splattered with
chicken blood, particularly on the day we meet when she reveals no trace of
the farmyard in her personal appearance. She is dressed in a sky-blue shirt
with matching earrings, and I notice that her fingernails are perfectly
trimmed and clean. That puzzled and impressed me in equal measure: how
someone so evidently seeped in the grit and dirt of her surroundings could
be so spotlessly turned out when she chose to.

But over a few hours spent in her company, the quality that stood out most
was precisely this ability to straddle different worlds with apparent ease.
Barbara Kingsolver - bestselling writer, eco-campaigner, farmer, mother.

The year of the "project" was in part for her an exploration, and a
celebration, of all those facets of her life. In the book there is a passage
that some women readers will relate to, others may find hard to swallow, in
which she says that she has finally, after many years, come to accept as a
compliment the idea of being a "housewife". She argues that women of her
generation made a "devil of a bargain" when they traded homemaking for
careers.

"We lost a lot - we traded our aprons for the minivan and the Lunchable, and
the result was children with health problems because we pick up junk food on
the way to the soccer game. That's the great hoodwink of my generation."

Over the span of the year of the project she found she gained some of that
homely comfort back, without jeopardising her job as a writer. She is
unabashed about her desire for domesticity, insisting her ability to talk
about it now is a sign of how far women have come, a mark of confidence
"that my cooking will not overshadow my other work".

Kingsolver's literary work is infused with the themes developed in Animal,
Vegetable, Miracle. Most obviously, her latest novel, Prodigal Summer, is
set in the Southern Appalachians and describes in fictional form the very
same landscape and love of nature.

But there are also clues to her interest in nature in Poisonwood Bible,
though they are harder to find. The novel, first published in 1999, is a
magnificent portrayal of a dysfunctional American family. It is told through
the voices of the wife and four daughters of a crazed evangelical Baptist
who has taken them to the Congo on a mission to save African souls. At face
value the harsh jungle setting of the novel, where even the trees are toxic
- the poisonwoods of the title - is as far from the rich and gentle
Appalachians as you could imagine, as is Nathan Price and his warring family
from Kingsolver's own brood. During the course of their locavore year, the
Kingsolver family if anything grew closer and more harmonious, in contrast
with the discordance displayed by her characters. "People in my novels
always have terrible problems. If they are not terrible, I make them more
terrible," she says.

Yet several of the themes pursued by Kingsolver in her non-fiction are
present in nascent form in Poisonwood Bible. The mad Baptist struggles in
vain to grow crops in the Congo because he stubbornly refuses to listen to
the local experts. His daughter Leah has difficulty making sense of her home
country to her African friend: "How could I explain to Anatole about soybean
fields where men sat in huge tractors like kings on thrones, taming the soil
from one horizon to the other?" Leah's twin sister, Adah, describes the
sensation on returning to the US of walking down a supermarket aisle stuffed
with produce that nobody really needs.

And there's an underlying link between the two books that goes to the core
of Kingsolver's power as a writer. Beneath their deceptively humanist
surfaces, both Poisonwood Bible and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle are intensely
political books. You can read Poisonwood Bible as a simple tale of tragedy
in the rotten heart of one family; but equally it is an allegory for the
damage wrought by US foreign policy, which sought to uphold the interests of
big corporations by frustrating Congo's early bid for independence - a
morality tale that seems to become more relevant with every passing day.

It's the same with her new book. You can read it as a straightforward
chronicle of a year spent eating locally garnered food; but equally it is a
caustic portrait of the wounds inflicted on America's own landscape by the
government-backed corporate drive for profits.

When I put this to her, she pauses, with the inward look of someone who
likes to choose her words carefully, and then she says: "What was done in my
name in the Congo was a presumption that what works in one culture should be
forced upon another, the agenda of course being to go in and get the goods.
Farming has become an extractive industry, like mining. It used to be about
the American dream, with families working hard to enrich themselves and
their communities; now it's about large powerful corporations pulling out
the good stuff and leaving behind a mess. So yes, there is a similarity."

The locavore year technically came to an end several months ago, though the
family has largely stuck with the regime. They eat out a little more
frequently than they did, and occasionally buy wild Atlantic salmon, though
they regard such treats as splurges rather than entitlements. Kingsolver is
working on a new novel, which she describes as "a fictional secret history
revealed in a surprising way".

Before we part, I ask her what change the year has had on her. "Physically,
not much. But I really have connected with this place. To eat of this place
helped me to become of it, to belong." And as we drive away down the farm's
dust track, Tom's love call fading into the distance, I admit to myself that
I got it wrong. There is a profound tranquillity here after all.