Barbara Kingsolver grows her own in "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle"

"Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life"

by Barbara Kingsolver, with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver

HarperCollins, 370 pp., $26.95

This reviewer is perturbed. On a sunny afternoon that would have been perfect for getting out to sift compost for the strawberry bed or to plant lettuce, I am sitting inside at the computer instead, trying to come up with the prescribed number of words that will give you a sense of Barbara Kingsolver's new book about how she successfully grew her own food and fed her family for a year. Sad to say, my current peevishness is an extension of my frame of mind that persisted through much of my reading of "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life."

Which isn't to say that Kingsolver's first book of narrative nonfiction isn't terrific, because in many ways, it is. The author of best-selling novels such as "The Poisonwood Bible" and "Pigs in Heaven" may well hit another home run with this effort, in which she takes on mainstream America's food culture, from agribusiness to fast food to Thanksgiving turkeys.

Now that everybody is paying more attention to global warming and its causes, it is pertinent to learn in this book that nearly 20 percent of our nation's energy use is devoted to agriculture. This should come as no surprise when one realizes that food typically travels an average of 1,500 miles to get to the plate on your table. Also factored in are the energy expenditures for processing, packaging and storing food.

Result: Way more calories are used in producing and shipping food than ever are redeemed by the person eating it. Ultimately, that's unsustainable.

So what's to be done?

"Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" asserts that if every American committed to eating one meal a week that included only locally and organically raised food, our country's oil consumption would be reduced by more than a million barrels a week.

Kingsolver and her family decided to make that commitment a thousand-fold. They resolved to become "locavores," eating only locally grown food for a year.

This book is a memoir of their experiment, and it really is a family affair, as Kingsolver's husband, Steven L. Hopp, provides factual sidebars on various agricultural issues, and college-age daughter Camille writes up the recipes they used.

The entire family, including 9-year-old younger daughter Lily, worked their Virginia farm. They raised poultry. They butchered poultry. They baked their own bread and made their own cheese. They reaped and they sowed (and then canned or dried or froze) tons of vegetables.

And they helped their turkeys learn about sex. This chapter, on its own, is one of the funniest essays I have ever read.

Kingsolver is idealistic but also down to earth. She grouses about too much zucchini like the rest of us, and she has a charmingly self-deprecating sense of humor.

All of which makes one feel churlish to complain, but I must. For even as Kingsolver and family argue that this whole effort to go back to local and organically grown foods is not elitist, they are farming their acreage, driving their hybrid car (those aren't cheap), sending Camille off to college and taking two vacations a year (one of them to Italy). When it comes to tax brackets, they must be a couple of pages further along in the IRS booklet than the families in my neighborhood.

Kingsolver passionately pencils out the ultimate savings of going organic. It looks great on paper, but when I go to the grocery store and have to choose between the agribusiness-produced green peppers or organically farmed peppers at five times the price, guess which one I'm going with?

It's time to go out and plant my lettuce. At least that's a start.

Barbara Lloyd McMichael tends her vegetables in Des Moines.