Review: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kinsolver

With Steven L. Hopp & Camille Kingsolver

Rating: 2 Stars

I want to preface this review by saying that it didn't take very long for me to discover that I am clearly not the intended audience for this book. As a North Dakota farm girl (we didn't live on the farm, but between my family and friends, I spent many of my formative years on farms) with an Agricultural Economist who worked for North Dakota State University's Research Extension Center for most of my life, and a mother who is a dietitian working for the local medical center, I know about food and food culture. My best friends father is an agronomist, who also works for the NDSU's research arm, so I also have a pretty tight connection to the research involved in GMOs and conventional farming. Basically, I am not the food moron that this book is meant for. So keep that in mind as I discuss all the things I disliked about this book.

My first issue was the discussion early on about how what we eat is causing everyone in the United States to become fat and killing us slowly from a mountain of diseases. I'm certainly not saying that what we eat doesn't play an important role in our overall health, but the complete focus on what we're eating, and not how we're eating is problematic. Portion size and a much more sedentary lifestyle are just as important when determining how to lead a more healthy life. 

Another thing I had trouble wrapping my head around was Kingsolver's contradictions, of herself! At one point in the book she waxes poetic about how difficult it has been for her local tobacco farmers since the downfall of tobacco. She goes on and on about how sad it is for those farmers because that was their livelihood and paid their bills, sent their kids to college, etc. and how will they survive as tobacco falls out of fashion. She's trying to evoke these feelings of sympathy for these farmers, and while I do sympathize, I struggle with the fact that she doesn't apply that same logic to any other farmers. It's like it only counts if it's her life experience. Many of the farmers in my area/life grow the crops and animals that are deemed the evils of farming by Kingsolver: soybeans, wheat, corn, cattle that will be sold before it's ready for slaughter. But these farmers are good people too. Soybeans and wheat sent my friends and cousins to college. Cattle sold before slaughter pays my aunt and uncle's bills. It's not nearly as cut and dried as Kingsolver wants it to be. Yes, corporate farming is a problem, but there are lots of what she would consider to be "large" farms that are still family operated. 

Along those lines, the constant harping on organic got really old, really fast. Almost all the farms in our area are considered conventional farms, but that doesn't mean they're not doing their part for conservation. Pasture rotation, crop rotation, and cover crop use are a regular part of farming around here. There are also tons of programs that farmers are taking advantage of to help preserve wildlife habitats in our area. So no, conventional farming does not always equal the end of the world as we know it. 

The other thing I struggled with was the lack of citation. All of the writers tossed out statistics and information often without anything concrete to back it up. There were some references made at the end of the book, and websites listed, but if you're going to be putting out hard statistics, I need a footnote and enough information to find the study myself. 

Finally, while I appreciated what they were trying to do, I found the book itself to be way too long and way too preachy for my tastes. Kingsolver is an excellent writer, but the whole thing came across as a way to prove how awesome their family is for doing this and how we should all just magically be able to do the same. I would have liked to read more about how the year actually went, how true to the eat local movement did they stay (at the end she briefly mentions they did buy some things like boxed mac and cheese), because just a little shot of humility and true struggle would have gone a long way to making this book more palatable for me. I also thought it could have been shortened considerably. I went in expecting to read a story about a family spending a year growing their own food, not be bombarded for over 300 pages about how organic is better and commercial farms are evil and conventional farming is killing the planet. Whether or not you agree those things are true, that's not how I felt that the book was promoted. I'm not made I read this, but I'm more than glad to be done with it and able to put it on the donate pile.