I have mixed feelings about this book. It took me an inordinately long time to get through, over three months. (I’ll explain why in a bit.) It was very readable and informative, but often, the tone just turned me off.

First, the good. This is a memoir about a year that Kingsolver and her family spent trying to eat as locally as possible, down to growing and raising most of their own food, and supplementing that at the farmers market and local purveyors. Several sections of the book are quite inspiring. When Kingsolver describes the satisfaction she derives from working her garden and canning her produce, it makes me want to get into my own garden and really bring it to life (even though it’s the dead of winter). Her account of a trip to Italy is mouth-watering, and her descriptions of breeding turkeys that have forgotten how to “get it on,” so to speak, are hilarious.

I learned a lot too, especially about planning a garden, eating seasonally and preserving food. Recipes are provided throughout, and I marked several I want to try, especially for homemade mozzarella.

But quite often, the tone of the narrative becomes hectoring, lecturing, not pleasant to read. I consider myself fairly well-educated about local and sustainable eating, but Kingsolver still managed to make me feel guilty about not doing enough. Such a militant tone can be quite a turnoff, which led me to putting down the book for weeks at a time. Not all of us have the luxury of time or space to grow such a large garden or slaughter our own chickens. Surely it’s enough to be concerned with where our food comes from and how it’s produced without all the residual–and useless–guilt. Michael Pollan manages to tackle similar issues without using such a heavy hand; Kingsolver’s heart is in the right place, but she needs to take care not to turn off the very people she is trying to convert.

So I can only give Animal, Vegetable, Miracle a lukewarm recommendation. Still, a recipe for homemade mozzarella may more than make up for the book’s weaknesses.

http://simplycooking.wordpress.com

This account of one family’s attempt to eat locally has changed the way I buy and cook food.

I was so ready for this to be better than it was.

Ok, so she did a really good job conveying carnivory and the morality of it. And she did a good job explaining how we here in the mountains (the “village” she refers to is not 20 miles from where I live) learn to live with strangers—especially the bit about how the first question is not “what do you do” but “who are your people” and if you have none, you have none and there is nothing you or your children can do about it even if you live here 75 years.

But she descends too often into educationery. I do not need an H1 explained to me, thank you. Especially not in a half-assed manner. And I do not need to be preached to. Just tell me your story and with your gift of language I would have been pleased. But that is not what she does with this book. In fact, the book has a dozen masters it tries to please, another weakness.

And why does she not eat apples her first winter here? Or ever even mention cabbage and cole slaw, the winter “salad” of choice? And you can’t not can (“We eat what we can and what we can’t, we can”)—that’s the only way to have green beans and green beans are, well, green beans.

And two, TWO, fossil fuel hogs of vacations in ONE year when she was supposedly eating locally? And a NEW car? Doesn’t she realize the waste produced for a new car? Better to recycle an old gas hog people—at least if you take into account the resources consumed. Which IS one of the points of her book.

I also hated Camille’s and Stephen’s bits in the books. Camille can’t write and Stephen’s are so simplistic a google search would give you better and more balanced information.

And then there’s the thing that she undertook this as a project just for the writing of this book, and that it has an end, and it isn’t anything she’s really committed to permanently and so that taints her experiences. And that she went into it IN ORDER TO write about it taints it too.

Oh, don’t take my complaints too seriously. I recommend it. And I’d love to talk with her and stuff, sure. And I’ve read all the other people she talks about too (Nabhan, Gussow, et al.). And I admire her and her writing. But there is a precious quality to this book that it didn’t need to have.