Lily, the 9-year-old family entrepreneur, worked out the details herself for her future egg business. Once settled down on the farm in Virginia, the family planned that first spring not only to grow as many vegetables as possible for their year of self-sustenance, but also decided to raise chickens and turkeys for meat. Steven Hopp, a professor of environmental studies, provides sidebars on topics related to ecology, agriculture and local slow food initiatives, while college-age Camille shares family seasonal recipes and her take on the next generation’s view of food and eating.Įven in arid Tucson Barbara had kept a backyard vegetable garden, and Lily had a small flock of laying hens to supply the family’s eggs. The farm in Virginia represented not only a completely opposite geographic and climatic haven, but a chance for Kingsolver and her family to prove that it could be possible-and deeply rewarding-to feed themselves through their own efforts, augmented by those of farmers living nearby.Īnimal, Vegetable, Miracle catalogs not only the material results of their first growing year on the farm, through Kingsolver’s warm, entertaining narrative, but also challenges the reader with substantive musings about the sorry state of our national food supply and what might be done, on an individual level, to improve things close to home. cities, it might as well be a space station where human sustenance is concerned.”Īnother calamity hovering on the horizon is the city’s shrinking clean water supply from non-renewable aquifers. All food sold and consumed in this desert city must be shipped in from somewhere else. Yet the one thing that Tucson could not provide its residents had become the most critical reason for Kingsolver’s decision to leave: Tucson does not grow its own food. Kingsolver’s exodus from one of the fastest growing cities in America, with its burgeoning cultural, educational and technological attractions, may have seemed odd timing for adults with successful professional careers.

This farm had served as the family’s annual summer destination-and gardening oasis-for a decade before their final move.

Although a resident of Tucson for the past 25 years, Kingsolver had grown up in rural Kentucky, just over the state line from the 40 acres of orchards and fields with barn and 100-year-old farmhouse in Virginia that her husband had owned for 20 years. In 2004 novelist Barbara Kingsolver, her husband Steven Hopp, and children Camille and Lily moved from Tucson, Arizona to a farm in southwestern Virginia. Nourishing Traditional Diets with Sally Fallon MorellĪnimal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life.

Animal vegetable miracle book review