42 pages • 1 hour read
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
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Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Called Home”
In the first chapter, Barbara Kingsolver establishes the premise of the book: It is an account of a year-long challenge she and her family set for themselves to eat locally, sustainably grown food. The family consists of Barbara, her husband Steven L. Hopp, her daughter from her previous relationship Camille Kingsolver, and her daughter Lily Hopp Kingsolver. The year begins when the family ends “our existence outside the city limits of Tucson, Arizona, to begin a rural one in southern Appalachia” (2).
They move to a farm, which Steven has owned for 20 years “with a farmhouse, barn, orchards and fields” (2). Their mission is to “attempt to feed ourselves animals and vegetables whose provenance we really knew. We tried to wring most of the petroleum out of our food chain” (10)
Kingsolver then explores a history of the farming and food production industry in America. She explains that the “drift away from our agricultural roots is a natural consequence of migration from the land to the factory […] but we got ourselves uprooted entirely by a drastic reconfiguration of U.S. farming, beginning just after World War II” (13).
At that time, the industrial processes and efficiencies developed for war turned toward agribusiness. Chemical fertilizers resulted in surpluses of specific crops like corn and soybeans. This was profitable, so “70 percent of all our midwestern agricultural land shifted gradually into single-crop corn or soybean farms” (14).
The government began to enact legislation favorable to huge, industrial farms producing only these high-yield crops. However, the over-processed foods made from them are high in calories and low in nutrition. As Kingsolver explains: “The Green Revolution of the 1970s promised that industrial agriculture would make food cheaper and available to more people. Instead, it has helped more of us become less healthy” (19).
Americans do not see this shift as much of an issue because “food culture in the United States has long been cast as the property of a privileged class. It is nothing of the kind. Culture is the property of a species” (16).
Recognizing the unhealthy situation of industrial foods, but also their convenience, the family set out “to prove—at least to ourselves—that a family living on or near green land need not depend for its life on industrial food” (22). Kingsolver documents their experiment throughout the year—the challenges, the victories, and the emotions.
This chapter also includes two short essays by Kingsolver’s husband, Steven L. Hopp. The first, “Oily Food,” explores how each American consumes “about 400 gallons of oil a year” (5) just in the cost of transporting their food across hundreds of miles. He points out that if Americans ate one meal a week composed of only local food, “we would reduce our country’s oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels of oil every week” (5).
The second, “Hungry World,” explores how the world produces “enough food to make every person on the globe fat” (18) but that millions starve anyway. The issue is the complicated and counterintuitive system of shipping food around the globe, rather than making sure people have easy access to local food.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Waiting for Asparagus: Late March”
Kingsolver describes the official start of her family’s local food experiment. First, they must decide when to start—they cannot begin in the New Year, as the Appalachian winter would make it difficult to start a farm. Therefore, they begin in March, when the first harvestable food begins to grow in their garden—asparagus.
Unlike most vegetables, asparagus is “a perennial, with a life span of many years;” (29) since they do not need to plant it fresh each season, it comes up first. Kingsolver uses the account of her family waiting for the first asparagus shoots of the season—and therefore the start of their experiment—to tease out how impatience has contributed to the current state of the food industry.
As Kingsolver puts it: “The main barrier standing between ourselves and a local-food culture is not price, but attitude. The most difficult requirements are patience and a pinch of restraint—virtues that are hardly the property of the wealthy” (31). In fact, “waiting for the quality experience seems to be the constitutional article that has slipped from American food custom” (32). The relatively easy, if high cost in terms of fuel consumption, availability of all kinds of foods at any time of year has conditioned Americans to ignore seasonality. She argues that this is not only a waste of fuel, but also a loss to taste, as foods taste best in season.
Kingsolver also describes early struggles her family faced in breaking these habits in themselves. Most notably, in late March and early April, the family craved fresh fruit when “fruits were only getting ripe in places where people were wearing bikinis” (35). However, the author goes to the local farmer’s market where she finds rhubarb. Although not technically a fruit, it is “loaded with vitamin C and tarty sweetness,” and so is, in many ways, “the April fruit” (38).
Kingsolver reflects that the family felt the local food pledge was rather arbitrary at the start, with rules about what they could and could not buy. But she points out that millions of families have their own rules “about cutting pastas by hand, rolling the sushi, making with care instead of buying on the cheap;” rules instituted in the name of “happiness and health” (39).
This chapter also includes one short essay from Hopp, called “How to Find a Farmer.” It explains how omnipresent farmers’ markets are, even in urban areas. Community-supported agriculture (CSA) is also popular, as “subscribers pay a producer in early spring and then receive a weekly share of the produce all season long” (37).
The chapter ends with an essay by Camille Kingsolver called “The Truth About Asparagus.” She describes how, when she was younger, she’d hated asparagus but that its high nutritional value and her parents’ preparation won her over. She describes several ways to cook asparagus and provides a suggested Late Winter Meal Plan featuring only in-season items (41).
Chapter 3 Summary: “Springing Forward”
In “Springing Forward,” Kingsolver describes the excitement she and her daughter Lily felt in April, when they began to plant the first seedlings of the season. In April, foods like “Bronze Arrowhead lettuces, Speckled Trout romaine, red kale” are in season (48). These are heirloom plants, meaning they are “open-pollinated—as opposed to hybrids, which are the onetime product of a forced cross between dissimilar varieties in a plant” (46). They are also plants that have never been genetically modified.
Kingsolver uses the account of her heirloom garden to explain the history—and negative effects—of genetically modified (GM) plants. Among the possibilities of a GM plant is the addition of “a ‘terminator gene’ that causes the crop to commit genetic suicide after one generation (47). This power means that “most standard vegetable varieties sold in stores have been bred for uniform appearance, mechanized harvest, convenience, […] and tolerance for hard travel;” as a result, flavor has suffered (48).
America’s acceptance of these substandard but ultimately convenient foods was the result of “fashion and marketing,” which made the “expensive party trick” of having out-of-season foods available into a profitable, bulk business (48). Vegetable farmers gradually stopped growing a big variety of foods in favor of having only a few modified and highly profitable varieties. As a result, “modern U.S. consumers now get to taste less than 1 percent” of the foods grown 100 years ago (49).
Worse, the Plant Variety Protection Act of 1970 moved “crop control from farmers to agribusiness” (50). Only six companies “control 98 percent of the world’s seed sales” and they invest heavily in GM research to make plants invulnerable to insects or herbicides—which they also sell (51). They also investigate farmers who save their seeds from one season to the next.
However, the result of this hybridization and genetic modification is that we depend on only a few types of crops and have lost the benefit of natural evolution. Kingsolver points out that “history has regularly proven it drastically unwise for a population to depend on just a few varieties for its sustenance. The Irish once depended on a single potato” (54).
Kingsolver is quick to point to hope, however. Organizations like Slow Food International protect heirloom species from “the homogenization of modern fast food and life” (55).
This chapter also includes Hopp’s essay “The Strange Case of Percy Schmeiser,” which details the plight of a farmer in Canada who was sued by Monsanto for $145,000 for illegally growing crops containing their patented genes. The genes had entered his canola crop when Monsanto plants on nearby farms pollinated his own crops. The court ruled in favor of Monsanto. Some countries limit corporations’ abilities to claim rights to intellectual property this way, but the “U.S. government has stepped in to circumvent these pro-consumer measures” (51).
The chapter ends with an essay from Camille entitled “First, Eat Your Greens.” It explores American belief in vitamins, which often contain more than the recommended doses of important minerals, and which would be unneeded if people ate a balanced, local diet. She ends with several recipes featuring April leafy greens, like spinach.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Stalking the Vegetannual”
Kingsolver next describes the “vegetannual,” which is a visual representation of a single plant that grows all foods, and which she uses to tell what is in season. All annual plants follow the same life cycle, and one can harvest various foods from them—“leaves, bulbs, fruits, or seeds, but each comes to us from some point along this same continuum” (64). Kingsolver acknowledges that eating foods in season only may seem to some like deprivation “because we’ve grown accustomed to the botanically outrageous condition of having everything, always” (65).
The transportation of food across the globe results in “the conspicuous consumption of limited resources” which “has yet to be accepted widely as spiritual error” (67). The system “is not, by its nature, a boon to Third World farmers, but it’s very good business for oil companies” (68).
Kingsolver is hopeful about movements that support local eating, including Slow Food International. She advocates for on-season eating as a way “that will keep grocery money in the neighborhood, where it gets recycled into your own school system and local businesses” (69).
Chapters 1-4 Analysis
In each chapter, Kingsolver tells a part of the narrative of her family’s yearlong experiment into eating only local food, using the anecdotes as springboards to explore food culture in the US in general. The reason the family undertakes the experiment is to attempt to break out of the American food culture and establish better eating habits. Beyond this, the experiment—and the book—is meant to show how eating better and eating local is possible, debunking many food myths and assumptions along the way.
The barriers to a positive food culture are generally of three types, as Kingsolver organizes them: corporate greed, an overreliance on convenience, and simple ignorance. She explains and overcomes these with a combination of facts and the examples set by her family.
In the first section, Kingsolver begins by shedding light on the cost of the current food system, which few Americans ever consider. The main reasons are purely environmental, as “we would reduce our country’s oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels of oil every week” (5).
However, if numbers and environmental considerations were all it took to change behaviors, everyone would be eating locally only. Kingsolver goes deeper, exploring how habits, especially eating habits, are difficult to break. In her words: “The most difficult requirements are patience and a pinch of restraint” (31). Combine this with the many “revolutionary” changes to farming in general, promoted by massive conglomerates, which have “helped more of us become less healthy,” and the state of the American food culture seems inescapable (19).
Kingsolver never stoops to blaming Americans in general for making poor decisions on purpose. She acknowledges and unpacks the corporate deceptions and manipulation that have resulted in an entire generation who have no real idea where their food comes from. Genetically modified foods, for example, may have begun with good intentions, but giant companies now use them to control and reap massive profits from farming, often at the expense of the public health. As a result, objectively healthy eating has become viewed as a privilege available to the wealthy.
However, Kingsolver’s point is that there is hope, and she means to show this by detailing how her family coped. After all, as she says, “culture is the property of a species,” not a privilege for the wealthy (16). She also makes the very compelling argument that much of America has forgotten what good food truly is—otherwise we would all surely realize how much tastier in-season and sustainably grown produce is. A society built on convenience has lost many things worth waiting for.
Sprinkled throughout are think-pieces and essays from Kingsolver’s husband, who delves into some unknown corners of sustainability and farming. Kingsolver’s daughter Camille generally contributes an essay to end each section, with her perspective and many recipes. The effect is to truly emphasize that this is a family project and one that anyone can undertake. As family is one of the major themes of the book, this theme is indeed fitting.
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