Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (2007) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit see section history

People edit see section history

• Barbara Kingsolver: Brought her family to Appalachia to farm and eat only food they produce locally for a year.
• Steven L. Hopp: Barbara's second husband
• Camille: Barbara's older daughter
• Lily: Barbara's younger daughter.
• Hersh: Add a description of this character.
• Elsie
• Paul
• Laura
• Wendell Berry
• Anne
• Alice Waters
• Kate
• Sanford Webb
• Kirsty Zahnke
• Amico
• Emily
• Ricki Carroll
• John Raeburn
• David
• Deborah Madison
• Malcolm
• Percy Schmeiser
• Abby
• Mr. Doodle
• Jimmy Carter
• Charlie
• Amadeo
• Lizzie Webb
• Diane
• Amy
• Eli
• Micki
• Kay
• Noah
• Tod Murphy

Quotes edit see section history

• “Our driveway was just the first tributary on a memory river sweeping us out.”

  Barbara referring to her family leaving Tucson

• “We were leaving it now in one of its uglier moments, which made good-bye easier, but also seemed like a cheap shot--like ending a romance right when your partner has really bad bed hair.”

  Barbara referring to her family leaving Tucson during a drought

• “Before we crossed a few state lines we'd need to give our car a salt treatment and indulge in some things that go crunch.”

• “We proceeded to wreck our agendas in the predictable fashion by falling in love.”

  Barbara on meeting her husband

• “By all accounts it's a bountiful source of everything on the human-need checklist, save for just the one thing--the stuff we put in our mouths every few hours to keep us alive.”

  referring to Tucson's lack of food production

• “If it crosses your mind that water running through hundreds of miles of open ditch in desert will evaporate and end up full of concentrated salts and muck, then let me just tell you, that kind of negative thinking will never get you elected to public office in the state of Arizona.”

  On the Colorado River aquaduct that provides drinking water to the Tucson population

• “The average food item on a US grocery shelf has traveled farther than most families go on their annual vacations.”

• “The Hohokam and Pima were the last people to live on that land without creating an environmental overdraft.”

  On the last humans to occupy southern AZ and grow their own food

• “But these gardens of ours had a drinking problem. So did AZ farms. That's a devil of a choice: Rob Mexico's water or guzzle Saudi Arabia's gas?”

• “...heading for the Promised Land where water falls from the sky and green stuff grows all around. We were about to begin the adventure of realigning our lives with the food chain. Naturally, our first stop was to buy junk food and fossil fuel.”

  Referring to the move from AZ to VA

• “I only submit that the children of farmers are likely to know where food comes from, and that the rest of us might do well to pay attention.”

• “North American children begin their school year around Labor Day and finish at the beginning of June with no idea that this arrangement was devised to free up children's labor when it was needed on the farm.”

• “The baby boom psyche embraces a powerful presumption that education is a key to moving away from manual labor, and dirt--two undeniable ingredients of farming.”

• “...why isn't it good enough for someone else to know multiplication and the contents of the Bill of Rights?”

  On people caring to know so little about how their food is produced

• “When we walked as a nation away from the land, our knowledge of food production fell away from us like dirt in a laundry-soap commercial.”

• “If every product containing corn or soybeans were removed from your grocery store, it would look more like a hardware store.”

• “Obesity is generally viewed as a failure of personal resolve, with no acknowledgment of the genuine conspiracy in this historical scheme. People actually did sit in strategy meetings discussing ways to get all those surplus calories into people who neither needed or wished to consume them.”

• “...our kids, who are predicted to be this country's first generation to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents.”

• “Food is the rare moral arena in which the ethical choice is generally the one more likely to make you groan with pleasure.”

• “...we were going to spend a year integrating our food choices with our family values, which include both 'love your neighbor' and 'try not to wreck every blooming thing on the planet while you're here.'”

  Barbara on their family's food experiment

• “Pushing a refrigerated green vegetable from one end of the earth to the other is, let's face it, a bizarre use of fuel.”

  On asparagus' seasonality

• “And all prewashed salad greens emanate from California....As fuel economy goes, I suppose the refrigerated tropicals like bananas and pineapples are the Humvees of the food world.”

• “How did supermarket vegetables lose their palatability, with so many people right there watching? The Case of the Murdered Flavor was a contract killing, as it turns out, and long-distance travel lies at the heart of the plot.”

• “In just a few decades the out-of-season vegetable moved from novelty status to such an ordinary item, most North Americans now don't know what out-of-season means.”

• “Indestructible vegetables, that is to say, creations that still looked good after a road trip.”

• “Modern US consumers now get to taste less than one percent of the vegetable varieties that were grown here a century ago. Those old-timers now lurk only in backyard gardens and on farms that specialize in direct sales--if they survive at all. Many heirlooms have been lost entirely.”

• “...humans have eaten some 80,000 plant species in our history. After recent precipitous changes, three-quarters of all human food now comes in just eight species, with the field quickly narrowing down to genetically modified corn, soy, and canola.”

• “We're losing them as fast as we're losing rain forests. An enormous factor in this loss has been the new idea of plant varieties as patentable properties, rather than God's gift to humanity....God lost that one in 1970, with the Plant Variety Protection Act. Anything owned by humans, of course, can be taken away from others; the removal of crop control from farmers to agribusiness has been powerful and swift. Six companies--Monsanto, Syngenta, DuPont, Mitsui, Aventis, and Dow--now control 98% of the world's seed sales.”

• “Garden seed inventories show that while about 5,000 nonhybrid vegetable varieties were available from catalogs in 1981, the number in 1998 was down to 600.”

• “Jack Harlan...wrote about the loss of genetic diversity in no uncertain terms: 'These resources stand between us and catastrophic starvation on a scale we cannot imagine....The line between abundance and disaster is becoming thinner and thinner.'”

• “...the Red Queen principle...after the Red Queen in Through the Looking Glass, who observed to Alice: 'In this place it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place.' Both predator and prey must continually change or go extinct.”

• “History has regularly proven it drastically unwise for a population to depend on just a few varieties for the majority of its sustenance.”

• “Our addiction to just two crops as made us the fattest people who've ever lived, dining just a few pathogens away from famine.”

• “Breeding to increase shelf life also has tended to decrease palatability.”

• “Human bodies and their complex digestive chemistry evolved over millennia in response to all the different foods--mostly plants-they raised or gathered from the land surrounding them.”

  From Camille

• “The conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners....We're just particular about which spiritual arguments we'll accept as valid for declining certain foods. Generally unacceptable reasons: environmental destruction, energy waste, the poisoning of workers. Acceptable: it's prohibited by a holy text.”

• “Most people no longer believe that buying sneakers made in Asian sweatshops is a kindness to those child laborers. Farming is similar....If you care about farmers, let the potatoes stay home.”

  From Steven Hopp

• “The business of transporting food across great distances is not, by its nature, a boon to Third World farmers, but it's very good business for oil companies.”

• “Maybe the world would likewise become more hospitable to diners who are queasy about fuel-guzzling foods, if that preference had a name. Petrolophobes? Seasonaltarians? Local eaters? Homeys? I've begun seeing the term locavores....”

• “Citizens of frosty worlds unite, and think about marching past the off-season fruits....”

• “During my visit I made sure all my relatives heard about the navigational brilliance that saved me thirty-seven minutes. 'Thirty-seven,' my grandfather mused. 'And you just used up fifteen of them telling all about it. What's your plan for the other twenty-two?'”

  On Barbara's elation at finding a shorter commute home

• “All that hurry can blur the truth that life is a zero-sum equation. Every minute I save will get used on something else....”

• “A survey of National Merit Scholars--exceptionally successful eighteen-year-olds crossing all lines of ethnicity, gender, geography, and class--turned up a common thread in their lives: the habit of sitting down to a family dinner table.”

• “When we traded homemaking for careers, we were implicitly promised economic independence and worldly influence. But a devil of a bargain it has turned out to be in terms of daily life....I consider it the great hoodwink of my generation.”

  On convenience food and latchkey kids

• “I have another rule about complicated dishes: ALWAYS double the recipe, so we can recoup the investment and eat this lovely thing again later in the week.”

• “Globally speaking, people consume more soft drinks and packaged foods as they grow more affluent; home-cooked meals of fresh ingredients are the mainstay of rural, less affluent people. This link between economic success and nutritional failure has become so widespread, it has a name: the nutrition transition.”

• “...cooking is good citizenship....But if grabbing fast food is the only way to get the kids to their healthy fresh-air soccer practice on time, that's an interesting call. Arterial-plaque specials that save minutes now can cost years, later on.”

• “The choreography of many people working in one kitchen is, by itself, a certain definition of family, after people have made their separate ways home to be together.”

• “We have dealt to today's kids the statistical hand of a shorter life expectancy than their parents, which would be US, the ones taking care of them. Our thrown-away food culture is the sole reason. By taking the faster drive, what did we save?”

• “A lot of human hobbies...are probably rooted in the same human desire to control an entire process of manufacture. Karl Marx called it the antidote to alienation. Modern business psychologists generally agree, noting that workers will build a better car when they participate in the whole assembly rather than just slapping on one bolt, over and over, all the tedious livelong day.”

• “...this is my best guess: alimentary alienation. We can't feel how or why it hurts. We're dying for an antidote.”

  On why Americans eat so much bad food on purpose

• “Ultra-high-temperature pasteurization...denatures proteins and destroys the curd. The sole purpose of UHP is to ship milk over long distances....UHP milk will not make cheese, period.”

  On cheese-making

• “'Ask your grocer where you milk come from...the closer to home your source, the better.'”

  New England cheese-making guru, Ricki

• “...a gradual cessation of milk digestion is normal. In all other mammals the milk-digesting enzyme shuts down soon after weaning....Over thousands of years of history, a few isolated populations developed intimate relationships with their domestic animals and a genetic mutation gave them a peculiar new adaptation: they kept their lactose-digesting enzymes past childhood. Geneticists have confirmed that milk-drinking adults are the exception to the norm....The gene for lifelong lactose digestion has an 86% frequency among northern Europeans.”

• “If everything my heart desired was handed to me on a plate, I'd probably just want something else.”

  Camille on the value of cooking your own food

• “Buying your goods from local businesses rather than national chains generates about three times as much money for your local economy.”

• “Thomas Jefferson...presumed on the basis of colonial experience that farming and democracy are intimately connected. Cultivation of land meets the needs of the farmer, the neighbors, and the community, and keeps people independent from domineering centralized powers. 'In Jefferson's time, that was the king....In ours, it's multinational corporations....Think Locally, Act Neighborly.'”

  Tod Murphy, owner of the Farmer's Diner in Vermont

• “Tom Jefferson against King George. It's people trying to keep work and homes together, versus conglomerates that scoop up a customer's money and move it out of town to a corporate bank account far away. Where I grew up, we used to call that 'carpetbagging.' Now it seems to be called the American way.”

• “'If every restaurant got just 10%of its food from local farmers...the infrastructure of corporate food would collapse.'”

  Tod Murphy

• “...the National Animal Identification System, through which the USDA now plans to attach an ID number and global positioning coordinates to every domestic animal in the country.”

• “'Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it.'”

  David, Barbara's Amish friend

• “It crossed my mind that the world's most efficient psychological evaluation would have just the one question: Define SPLURGE.”

• “Modern conventional farming is an efficient reduction of that process that adds back just a few crucial nutrients of the many that are removed each year when biomass is harvested. At first, it works well. Over time, it's like trying to raise all children on bread, peanut butter, and the same bedtime story every night for ten years. (If they cry, give them more bread, more peanut butter, and the same story twice.) An observer from another planet might think all the bases were covered, but a parent would know skipping the subtleties adds up to slow starvation.”

• “Several studies...have shown fruits and vegetables grown without pesticides and herbicides to contain 50 to 60 percent more antioxidants than their sprayed counterparts.”

• “Garrison Keillor says July is the only time of year when country people lock our cars in the church parking lot, so people won't put squash on their front seat. I used to think that was joke.”

• “'Eaters must understand that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it it inescapably an agricultural act, and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used.' Eaters MUST, he claims, but it sure looks like most eaters DON'T.”

  Barbara quoting Wendell Berry

• “Wendell Berry summed it up much better than 'blue and red' in one line of dialogue from his novel Jayber Crow, which is peopled by farmers struggling to survive on what the modern, mostly urban market will pay for food. After watching nearly all the farms in the county go bankrupt, one of these men comments: 'I've wished sometimes that the sons of bitches would starve. And now I'm getting afraid they actually will.'”

  On the uneasy relationship between rural and urban dwellers in the US

• “It's hard to believe, given the amount of truck fuel involved, but transportation is tax-deductible for the corporations, so we taxpayers paid for that shipping.”

  On why organic tomatoes from CA are cheaper than local organic ones

• “If we draw the okay-to-kill line between 'animal' and 'plant,' and thus exclude meat, fowl, and fish from our diet on moral grounds, we still must live with the fact that every sack of flour and every soybean-based block of tofu came from a field where countless winged and furry lives were extinguished in the plowing, cultivating, and harvest....Butterflies, too, are universally killed on contact in larval form by the genetically modified pollen contained in most US corn.”

• “To believe we can live without taking life is delusional.”

• “I take my gospel from Wendell Berry, who writes in What Are People For, 'I dislike the thought that some animal has been made miserable in order to feed me. If I am going to eat meat, I want it to be from an animal that has lived a pleasant, uncrowded life outdoors, on bountiful pasture, with good water nearby and trees for shade. and I am getting almost as fussy about food plants.'”

• “It's just the high-mindedness that rankles; when moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot-air balloon that's awfully hard not to poke. The farm-liberation fantasy simply reflects a modern cultural confusion about farm animals.”

  On some vegan views that letting all animals roam wild, untouched by humans is kinder

• “My animals have all had a good life, with death as its natural end. It's not without thought and gratitude that I slaughter my animals, it is a hard think to do....But I always think of Kahlil Gibran's words: 'When you kill a beast, say to him in your heart: By the same power that slays you, I too am slain and I too shall be consumed. For the law that delivers you into my hand shall deliver me into a mightier hand. Your blood and my blood is naught but the sap that feeds the tree of heaven.'”

• “The ve-vangelical pamphlets showing me jam-packed chickens and sick downer-cows usually declare, as their first principle, that all meat is factory-farmed. That is false, and an affront to those of us who work to raise animals humanely, or who support such practices with our buying power. I don't want to cause any creature misery, so I won't knowingly eat anything that has stood belly deep in its own poop wishing it was dead until BAM, one day it was. (In restaurants I go for the fish or vegetarian option.)”

• “Bananas that cost a rain forest, refrigerator-trucked soy milk, and prewashed spinach shipped two thousand miles in plastic containers do not seem cruelty-free, in this context....It seems facile to declare one single forbidden fruit, when humans live under so many different kinds of trees.”

  On the choide to decline eating meat on moral grounds

• “But globally speaking, the vegetarian option is an luxury. The oft-cited energetic argument for vegetarianism, that it takes ten times as much land to make a pound of meat as a pound of grain, only applies to the kind of land where rain falls abundantly on rich topsoil.”

• “'...no other country raises and slaughters its food animals quite as intensively or brutally as we do.'”

  From journalist Michael Pollan

• “We the living take every step in tandem with death, naught but the sap that feeds the tree of heaven, whether we can see that or not. We bear it by the grace of friendship, good meals, and if we need them, talking turkey heads.”

• “On the other hand, if cattle remain on pasture right to the end, that kind of beef is called 'grass finished.' The differences between this and CAFO beef are not just relevant to how kindly you feel about animals: meat and eggs of pastured animals also have a measurably different nutrient composition....USDA studies found much lower levels of saturated fats and higher vitamin E, beta-carotene, and omega-3 levels in meat from cattle fattened on pasture grasses....eggs from chickens that ranged freely on grass have about half the cholesterol of factory-farmed eggs, and its mostly HDL, the cholesterol that's good for you. They also have more vitamin E, beta-carotene and omega-3 fatty acids than their cooped-up counterparts. The more pasture time a chicken is allowed, the greater these differences.”

  From Camille

• “I should tell you that the high-acid stomachs of grain-fed cattle commonly harbor acid-resistant strains of E.coli that are very dangerous to humans.”

  Camille on the benefits of consuming grass-fed cattle

• “After arriving on the ancestral soil I figured out pretty quickly why that heritage swamps all competition. It's a culture that sweeps you in, sits you down in the kitchen, and fees you so well you really don't want to leave.”

  Upon her arrival to Italy

• “Eating establishments where eating isn't the point--is that a strange notion? What we discovered in Italy was that if an establishment serves food, then food IS THE POINT.”

• “...a sit-down restaurant in Italy aims for you to it down and STAY THERE....but in most cases a few bites seems to be the norm. Then slow chewing, and joy. Watching Italians eat (especially men, I have to say) is a form of tourism the books don't tell you about.”

  On dining in Italy

• “Urban areas cover 2% of the earth's surface but consume 75% of its resources.”

  From Stephen Hopp

• “I asked if he had any seeds, glanced around for one of those racks. He leaned toward me indulgently, summoning the disposition that all good people of the world maintain toward the earnest dimwitted: the SEEDS, he explained, are INSIDE THE PUMPKIN.”

  On meeting an Italian farmer at a produce stand

• “I do know that flavors work their own ways under the skin, into the hearts of longing. Where my kids are concerned I find myself hoping for the simplest things: that if someday they crave orchards where their kids can climb into the branches and steal apples, the world will have trees enough with arms to receive them.”

• “Cooking is 80% confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice.”

• “We discussed a cranberryless Thanksgiving, and agreed that would be like kissing through a screen door. Who needs it? Did we need it--was it essential that this feast be 100% pure Hoppsolver-grown? Personal quests do have a way of taking on lives of their own, even when nobody knows or cares....”

• “There's the miracle for you, the absolute sacrifice that still holds back seeds: a germ of promise to do the whole thing again, another time.”

• “No matter where I was in this house, that vividly resinous orangey scent woke up my nose whenever anyone peeled one in the kitchen. Lily hugged each one to her chest before undressing it as gently as a doll. Watching her do that as she sat cross-legged on the floor one morning in pink pajamas, with bliss lighting her cheeks, I thought: Lucky is the world to receive this grateful child. Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing.”

  On the family's reaction to purchasing the first citrus fruit in eight months

• “I have given and received some of my life's most important hugs with those big oven-mitt potholders on both hands.”

  On the importance of cooking as a family

• “Here I stand in the consecrated presence of all they have wished for me, and cooked for me. Right here, canning tomatoes with Camille, making egg bread with Lily. Come back, I find myself begging every memory. Come back for a potholder hug.”

  On cooking evoking memories of lost loved ones

• “Several cross-cultural studies...have shown lower rates of depression and bipolar disorder in populations consuming more seafood; neurological studies reveal that it's the omega-3 fatty acids in ocean fish that specifically combat the blues. These compounds (also important to cardiovascular health) accumulate in the bodies of predators whose food chains are founded on plankton or grass--like tuna or salmon....Joseph Hibbeln, M.D....points out that in most modern Western diets 'we eat grossly fewer omega-3 fatty acids now. We also know that the rates of depression have radically increased, by perhaps a hundred-fold.'”

• “From a biological perspective, the ultimate act of failure is to raise helpless kids. Not a parent I know who's worth the title wants to do that. But our operating system values Advanced Placement Comparative Politics, for example, way, way ahead of Knowing How to Make Your Own Lunch. Kids who can explain how supernovas are formed may not be allowed to get dirty in play group, and many teenagers who could construct and manage a Web site would starve if left alone on a working farm.”

• “But the rules for healthy domestic animal populations are entirely unlike those we apply to ourselves....The apple tree gains strength from strict breeding and pruning. So does the herd.”

  On the value of natural selection

• “But most of the world's malnourished children live in countries that already produce surplus food.”

  From Steven Hopp

• “...our family's food footprint for the year was probably around one acre. By contrast, current nutritional consumption in the US requires an average of 1.2 cultivated acres for every citizen--4.8 acres for a family of four....in 2050, the amount of US farmland available per citizen will be only .6 acres.”

• “Every food calorie we presently eat has used dozens or even hundreds of fossil-fuel calories in its making: grain milling, for example, which turns corn into the ingredients of packaged foods, costs ten calories for every one food calorie produced. That's before it gets shipped anywhere. By the time my children are my age, that version of dinnertime will surely be an unthinkable extravagance.”

Setting & Locations edit see section history

• Virginia: South East Kentucky / South West Virginia
• United States
• Italy
• California
• Tucson
• Kentucky
• North America
• Rome
• Arizona
• New York
• Appalachia
• France
• New England
• Tuscany
• India
• Europe
• Iowa
• South America
• New Zealand
• Peru
• North Carolina

Organizations edit see section history

• The True Food Network: 2601 Mission Street, Suite 803, San Francisco, CA 94110Dedicated to stopping the genetic engineering of food.www.truefoodnow.org

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Glossary edit see section history

• facile: moving, acting, working, proceeding, etc., with ease, sometimes with superficiality
• CAFO: Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation, like a feedlot
• trephination: Removal of a circular piece of bone, especially of the skullRead more
• prurient: Having or encouraging an excessive interest in sexual matters
• sensate: Able to perceive with the senses; sensing: "the infant stretches, sensate"
• trenchant: Vigorous or incisive in expression or style

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Barbara Kingsolver (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Awards edit see section history

• James Beard Foundation Book Award (2008: Writing on Food, Winner)

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: S521.5.A67 K56
• Dewey: 641.0973

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Biographies & Memoirs › Memoirs
• Books › Biographies & Memoirs › Arts & Literature › Authors
• Books › Biographies & Memoirs › Specific Groups › Women
• Books › Home & Garden › Gardening & Horticulture › Techniques › Organic
• Books › Entertainment › Humor › Rural Life

More Books Like This edit see section history

Books Cited by This Book edit see section history