New West Book Review

Kingsolver’s Quest: “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle”

By Jenny Shank, 7-23-07

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
By Barbara Kingsolver with Steven L. Hopp & Camille Kingsolver
HarperCollins, 370 pages, $26.95

In Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Barbara Kingsolver writes about the year she cut “the industrial umbilicus” and fed her family with locally grown food (with a few exceptions, such as coffee, grains, and spices), relying largely on what they grew and raised themselves on a Virginia farm.  As I gulped down this book, I wondered what made this story of shopping at farmer’s markets, planting seeds, and baking bread so engrossing, apart from Kingsolver’s winning prose style. 

A lot of the book is an account of chores, something I get enough of at home without reliving it in my spare time.  Then I recognized it--underlying this tale is the structure of The Hero’s Journey, which Joseph Campbell analyzed in The Hero With A Thousand Faces.  When employed inelegantly, the Hero’s Journey structure can result in a clichéd hockey movie featuring a burly goalie learning to figure skate and winning a pairs competition.  But when employed with subtlety, it can give a story a motor.  In Kingsolver’s case, it makes her passages on the evils of industrial produce and high-fructose corn syrup, which could turn preachy in less skilled hands, go down easily, because just as Luke Skywalker had to avoid the pull of the dark side, Kingsolver’s family must avoid bananas and California produce to succeed on their quest.

The Hero’s Journey always begins with a “Call to Adventure” that lures the hero from his ordinary world.  As Animal, Vegetable, Miracle opens, Barbara Kingsolver writes about leaving Arizona, where she’d lived for decades, to return to the more fertile terrain of the South where she was raised. She writes of Tuscon, “Like many other modern U.S. cities, it might as well be a space station where human sustenance is concerned.  Virtually every unit of food consumed there moves into town in a refrigerated module from somewhere far away.” So off they head to Virginia.

Often the hero is reluctant to begin his daunting task (the “Refusal of the Call") and Kingsolver and her family took some time to settle in before embarking on their local food project.  “It seemed sensible to start with the growing season, but what did that mean, exactly?” she writes.  “When wild onions and creasy greens started pop up along the roadsides?” They opt to begin when the first asparagus starts to appear in their garden.

In the Hero’s Journey, the hero is often aided by mentors.  In Kingsolver’s book, these mentors take the form of people selling produce at the local farmer’s market and the farmers and cooks she and her husband meet on a brief foray into Italy.  (As others, including Elizabeth Gilbert have noted, those Italians really know how to live where food is concerned).  Kingsolver’s allies are her family, of course, including a husband who wrote sidebars on various nutritional topics and apparently bakes a loaf of bread every single day, a teenage daughter who prefers kale to Cheetos (and supplies family recipes throughout the book), and a younger daughter who nurtures a flock of chickens and launches an egg-selling business.

And there are enemies--in Kingsolver’s book, these mostly take the form of points of view she disagrees with, such as those who label people who take care to eat local food ("locavores") elitist.  Because she believes good food can be expensive to produce, she challenges the reader to rethink the idea of shopping for the lowest priced option: “a perception of organic food as an elite privilege is a considerable obstacle to the farmer growing food for middle-income customers whose highest food-shopping priority is the lowest price.”

And there is also the writer who listed Kingsolver as “the seventy-fourth most dangerous person in America” (in Bernard Goldberg’s 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America).  This, she writes, “gave a certain pizzazz to my days…as I went about canning tomatoes, doing laundry, meeting the school bus…”

The hero always faces trials along the way, but for Kingsolver the feared difficulty of famine in the pantry during the dead of winter never materializes, because they spent all summer canning and freezing food.  She writes, “Eating locally in midwinter is easy.  But the time to think about that would be in August.”

Instead, her trials take the form of a failed pumpkin soup recipe, the necessary but difficult chore of slaughtering poultry, and some misadventures in turkey breeding.  But the most difficult obstacle she must overcome is the constant daily work of foraging, planting, weeding, tending, harvesting, plucking, cutting, drying, canning--in this regard she seems to have worked as hard as Frodo making his way to Mordor.  But Kingsolver faces it bravely.  She writes:

“In a culture that assigns nil prestige to domestic work, I usually self-deprecate when anyone comments on my gardening and cooking-from-scratch lifestyle.  I explain that I have to do something brainless to unwind from my work, and I don’t like TV.  But the truth is, I enjoy this so-called brainless work.  I like the kind of family I can raise on this kind of food.”

The final step of the Hero’s Journey is the return, where the hero comes back from his quest with new knowledge.  In Kingsolver’s case, the end of her year-long effort wasn’t dramatic, but she writes, “I understood that I had kept some promise to myself, having to do with learning to see the world differently.” The family plans to go on eating the way they have, eschewing tropical fruit, though they may plant less so they can take more vacations in future years.  Kingsolver writes, “We were not counting down the days until the end, because we didn’t want to go back.”

Most of us won’t have the time, land, or energy to embark on the local eating quest that Kingsolver took, but some of her more gentle nudges--buy more food at farmer’s markets, stock up on what’s in season, try to eat locally one day a week--seem like reasonable tasks for even the least heroic among us.

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