When Lily starts her brood of chickens, she selects their lineage with care. She wants those that will lay eggs during the winter so that she can keep her customers supplied year round. Lily is the nine-year-old daughter of Barbara Kingsolver and Steven Hopp and she has an entrepreneurial bent focused on chickens and eggs. She’s the character in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life who stole my heart. Her commitment, determination, excitement and downright love for her chickens make most adults look like wimps.
After twenty-four years of living in Tucson, Barbara Kingsolver returned to the area where she grew up, the tobacco growing area of Virginia. She and her family decided to spend one year eating only those foods grown in their local area, and most would come from their own farming efforts. The meals and recipes described in chapters such as Waiting for Asparagus: Late March, Zucchini Larceny: July, and Smashing Pumpkins: October are mouth watering. They go a long way toward convincing the reader that it’s possible to give up our petroleum-based food system and eat in a healthier and tastier way.
The major character in Kingsolver’s book is the family farm, a place overflowing with bounty of different kinds during various seasons of the year. To help us non-farm-based readers comprehend how the farm can feed a family throughout a year, Kingsolver invents the “vegetannual”, a mythical plant that bears spinach, kale, lettuce, and chard in April and May; snow peas, baby squash and cucumbers in June; green beans, green peppers, and small tomatoes in July; beefsteak tomatoes, eggplants, and yellow peppers in late July and August; cantaloupes, watermelon, and pumpkins in late August and September; and lastly the root crops.
One of my favorite chapters is Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast. It was cool to find out that husband Steven, who teaches environmental studies at Emory & Henry College, bakes the family’s bread almost every day, but “What kind of weirdo makes cheese?” Well, it turns out that Kingsolver’s family members are those weirdos, treating the reader to some humorous moments in the description of a cheese-making class. In fact, the image of the whole family making mozzarella together, “all of us laughing, stretching the golden rope as far as we could pull it” is enough to make readers want to participate in all the fun.
Making cheese, canning tomatoes, baking bread, roasting turkey or lamb are all sources of delight for this family of four. Glimpsing their homegrown fun makes you wonder why we gave up all of this to pull a lever or sit at a computer all day!
Barbara Kingsolver authored most of this book, but her daughter Camille contributed great family recipes and short pieces on a young person’s reaction to all of this farm business. Husband Steven Hopp wrote informative sidebars on environmental issues. Only Lily, too busy with her chicken and egg enterprise, failed to pen any part of the family food narrative.
