Reviews for Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

The average rating for Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-05-13 00:00:00 Bill Welsh I do not want to have lunch with Barbara Kingsolver. I do not want to sit across the table from this self-satisfied woman and have her gently scold me for eating imported "world traveler" foods, like bananas. I also do not want to hear any more of her stories about how awesome she and her family are, and how they were able to eat primarily off what they could grow in their backyard, (plenty of fresh vegetables!) or buy from local farmers (who are all personal friends, anyway! Aren't we cool?). I don't want to hear any more about how her family is doing their part to stop global warming by reducing food processing and transportation costs, and now they all managed to do it without fighting. Who are these people? Everybody gets home from work or school and has to go garden until dark every freaking day, and there's no fighting? There's no salmon, or packaged cookies, or Cheetos, and there's still no fighting? Even though some members of the family are 17 and, like, 10? What I wanted most of all was to hear the stories about how she caught her daughter hiding Little Debbie under the bed, or how her teenager was too embarrassed to bring her friends over without soda to offer them. But nooooo. No such humanizing details. Some small bumps in the road, such as when the teenager craves fresh fruit in early spring, but none is in season. But -- a ha! -- easily solved, with rhubarb from the farmer's market. Give me a break. This is cheating the readers. It had to have been more interesting than this. But, that aside, it actually was pretty interesting. She's a wonderful writer, and much of the information and storytelling was totally fascinating. I will be thinking about this book for a long time, and it really has inspired me to pay more attention to local growing seasons, (although in California I guess we're a little spoiled,) and do more shopping at farmer's markets, and cook more, and perhaps even grow my own tomatoes...heirloom, of course. I just don't want to hang out with Barbara Kingsolver. Ever. Unless she's prepared to talk about what really went down.

Review # 2 was written on 2007-09-09 00:00:00 Robert Gilchrist This book was one of my big disappointments so far this year, because I went in thinking I'd really like it and wound up so unimpressed that I think I actually hated it. The premise of the book is an interesting one, so interesting that I called my mother on the way back from the bookstore to tell her all about this new book I just picked up that I thought she'd really like! Barbara Kingsolver and her family have decided, for various environmental, political, and health reasons, to eat locally for a year and try and raise as much of their own produce and meat as they deemed feasible. Kingsolver is a good writer and I've enjoyed Animal Dreams and The Bean Trees, so I assumed I would enjoy her adecdotes about her family's efforts to grow their own food supply. What I ended up with was an essayist trying relentlessly to convert me over to her point of view. America is bad, cooking your own food is good, be ashamed of your horrible non-food-cooking empty life. I'm exaggerating a little bit but not much. Over and over again Kingsolver relates large-scale problems in America (crime! addiction!) today to the fact that we no longer live close to our own food supplies. She has some valid points, but the holier-than-thou attitude ended up annoying me so much I couldn't make myself receptive to her message, and instead devoted myself to picking apart her examples. Also, it felt like there was a subtle sexism going on with regard to a woman's place in the home. Her husband may have made all the bread in their household but Kingsolver and her daughters were portrayed as doing most of the labor and cooking, and as one point she talks about the deep contentment she gets out of Thanksgiving, all the women in the kitchen working and gossiping together as they cook, all the men outside pretending they can throw around a pigskin. I think my favorite one, though, was when she said that women going into the workplace in the mid-20th Century was the reason why America's food culture devolved. There was this sense that, wow, America had just been so much better a hundred years ago, gosh, why can't we all just get back to that. My new goal is go get everyone to read this book and find out if they hate it as much as I did.