Barbara Kingsolver's New Book

I'd like to highlight Barbara Kingsolver's new book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, as well as her interview with Powell's regarding her family's experiences during the yearlong experiment which led up to its writing.

After twenty-five years in the Arizona desert, in 2004, Kentucky-bred Barbara Kingsolver moved back to the Appalachians, to a Virginia farm just hours from her childhood home. Family called. "Returning," she explains in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, "would allow my kids more than just a hit-and-run, holiday acquaintance with grandparents and cousins."

But Kingsolver adds, "There is another reason the move felt right to us, and it's the purview of this book. We wanted to live in a place that could feed us: where rain falls, crops grow, and drinking water bubbles right up out of the ground."

Kingsolver is on my must-buy list anytime a new book comes out. I was introduced to her extraordinary writing and deeply-felt compassion when I read her novel, The Poisonwood Bible, and found her collected essays to be as riveting as her fiction. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
is a collaboration with the entire family, both parents natural scientist writers, with contributions by their daughters. Her experience is informed by her upbringing in the Appalachians:

I was raised to be a very practical person. It's interesting that you equate it to a training in science. I myself would go further back and claim that my persistently optimistic outlook has to do with the place and time where I was raised. I grew up in a community of farmers who faced every day as a problem to tackle and solve by evening, and they mostly did. You cannot be a farmer without being extremely optimistic and hopeful and resilient.

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The environmental picture can be daunting. It can feel grim. The whole issue of vanishing culture and the simple matter of the vanishing family dinner are sad and maybe even scary subjects. And I mean scary: Look at statistics about type 2 diabetes, or the rampant epidemic of childhood obesity, or the fact that right now we are raising the first Americans to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents — and that's solely a result of what we're feeding them. These are grim facts to face.

Also, food policy in our country is so stacked against the farmers that raise healthy foods, and it so heavily subsidizes commodity crops and processed foods. This is enough to make you sit down at your kitchen table and weep. But why do that when you can cook up something wonderful instead?

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We live in a world of complex interactions between microbial life and soil, between plankton and their marine habitat. We ignore those interactions at our peril. We ultimately don't have the option of fouling our nest beyond repair. We depend on our habitat and food chain, like it or not, human though we may be.

One thing we really wanted to talk about in this book is what's it's like to reengage both as a mental exercise and a spiritual exercise, if I may say, to reengage with the systems that sustain our lives — not just the people but the animals and the plants that sustain us — and re-envision a world in which we're not top-heavy hominids walking around all alone but in fact surrounded by life on which we depend.

~ * ~

These are just snippets from Kingsolver's fascinating interview with Powell's. Please be sure to take a look at it in its entirety.