Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
by Barbara Kingsolver (with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver)
HarperCollins, 2007; $26.95

When Barbara Kingsolver and her family began planning a year-long immersion in their local foodshed, the concept seemed original. By the time they completed an account of their year as “locavores,” regional eating had entered the mainstream – powered by the Slow Food movement, food safety concerns, and books such as Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

While no longer fresh in concept, Kingsolver’s account of their year still affirms the pleasures of local eating and family cooking, where each season brings its own abundance (yes, even midwinter). The book is an extended invitation to relinquish eating habits that are hard on person and planet, and to find greater nourishment for body and soul by selecting foods from known local sources.

Kingsolver deftly weaves the personal and political, melding her family’s taste for fresh produce with its distaste for a food system that uses 87 calories of fuel to transport 1 calorie worth of fruit from California to New York. Pile that extravagance atop of biodiversity losses, feedlot atrocities, and misplaced governmental subsidies, and you get – in Kingsolver’s words – “untallied debts that will be paid by our children in the currency of extinctions, economic unravelings, and global climate change.”

As a family, they approached this experiment in agricultural reform with a missionary zeal and a willingness to work hard (even daughter Lily, age 9). A collaborative spirit enriches the book, with husband Steven Hopp contributing fact-filled sidebars and daughter Camille adding earnest postscripts with favorite family recipes.

One of their hardest moments comes when they face the realization that “you can’t run away on harvest day.” A long-time vegetarian, Kingsolver returned to growing and slaughtering her own meat after realizing that a vegetal diet does not relieve one of responsibility for animal deaths (given the collateral destruction that results from pesticides, habitat loss and farm machinery). “Globally speaking, the vegetarian option is a luxury …,” she believes. The argument 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 … Managed grazing is healthier for most landscapes … than annual tilling and planting, and far more fuel-efficient.”

Even with a meat-based diet, the Kingsolver family finds local eating a highly affordable choice. (She claims they ate well at a cost of just 50 cents per family member per meal!) They purchased flour for bread and organic grain for their heirloom chickens and turkeys, and each family member was allowed one fair-trade luxury (such as coffee and cocoa). Mostly, though, they lived off produce from their local farmers’ market and their own berry patches, orchard, pasture and 3,500-square-foot garden in southwestern Virginia. They managed to grow, harvest, preserve and prepare their food around the demands of two full-time jobs, two children and travel commitments. It must help that on their farm – to all appearances – crops never fail, poultry never sicken, and stored produce never spoils. But the exaggerated ease of ‘growing your own’ does not diminish the book’s credibility: It’s an inspirational account of tackling global problems in your own back yard, and serving up some exceptional meals in the process.

– F. Marina Schauffler, an environmental writer and editor, is author of Turning to Earth (Virginia, 2003).

Green Horizons Exhibit at Bates College Museum of Art

An impressive array of artworks on display now through December 9 at the Bates College Museum of Art in Lewiston is brought together under the themes of “sustainability” and “green.” Museum director Mark Bessire and Education Coordinator Anthony Shostak seek to incite a dialogue within the college and local community regarding consumerism, waste generation and predictions of ecological catastrophe through the display of large paintings (Alexis Rockman’s colossal Manifest Destiny), enormous crafted room dividers (hangings assembled from waste CDs and from discarded textile materials), oversized photographs (disturbingly beautiful images of discarded circuit boards and cell phones), and documentary displays of environmental and performance art. Even works combining technical virtuosity and elegance also comment upon sustainability (prints incorporating rust from discarded steel plates and using non-toxic processes, for example).

The exhibit features the work of an international cast of artists, including faculty from Bates and other Maine colleges, along with several delightful student/faculty/community projects. The latter include works that explore issues of memory, history, movement, clothing and fashion, energy consumption, nature observation and more. Mark Silber, Maine organic farmer, writer, photographer and cultural anthropologist, displays gorgeous images of the annual gardening cycle on revolving, translucent “vitrines.” Another work incorporates collard greens, displayed in gigantic form indoors (made from recycled materials) and planted from seed outdoors, and involves cooperation with the student-founded Lots to Garden downtown reclamation effort in Lewiston.

Think of the exhibit as a kind of Common Ground Country Fair, albeit set up in a quiet, climate-controlled set of rooms, in the way it brings together a terrific variety of objects, processes and intentions. On the other hand, maybe the exhibit could move to a tent on the Fairgrounds, where crowds gather every year to talk about sustainability and greenness, and the environment is, shall we say, more dynamic. Nevertheless, bringing together a disparate community of participants (including the Beehive Collective, Thorncrag Bird Sanctuary, and the Pearson Widrig Dance Theater), the exhibit inspires an abundance of questions and feelings about issues of waste, recycling and sustainability, and the role of creative expression concerning such matters. Each picture, object and display could form the basis for an interesting and productive discussion, and spark some ideas for creative work of your own.

The museum is located at 75 Russell St., Lewiston, Maine. Call 207-786-6758 or go to www.bates.edu/museum for more information.

– Tim Nason

Food in England
by Dorothy Hartley
MacDonald & James, 1954
Little, Brown, London, 1996, 1999, 2003; paperback, 672 pgs.
Available online, used, for about $27

I recently started rereading Dorothy Hartley's classic food and household history cookbook, Food in England, stimulated by the exciting reports in the May-June 2007 MOF&G about the Terra Madre Slow Food meetings in Italy, and the ongoing exploration of traditional and folk food technology. This fat tome researches, and charmingly illustrates, food storage, processing and cooking in the British Isles, from original sources from the 1500s to the 1800s, and with ample information and recipes gathered more recently (between the World Wars) by word of mouth and during Hartley’s anthropological researches of disappearing rural practices as industrial methods of production closed in.
 
I find this book endlessly entertaining and informative. Hartley writes much of meat, eggs and fish, being in a cold and clammy clime, and of how the fuels – peat, wood and coal – used in various regions determine the cooking and preserving methods used – salting, pickling, drying, smoking and potting. She delves into food at sea, in those eras of long-range conquest, piracy and trade; of food on the road; what was eaten at a medieval feast; and about famine. Her diagram of packing the medieval cauldron is probably the source for all the illustrations in children's guides to castle life. She describes baking and brewing, and managing the household dairy and the delicacies produced. Pies, their origins, and pie crust, as container, cooking pot and wrapping, occur throughout. But she eventually gets to the vegetables, herbs (wild and tame), mushrooms and seaweed and their seasonal dishes.
 
The sad end of much of this food glory begins as the 19th century wanes and rural life is eclipsed by mass production. But Hartley gamely finishes the book with "Sundry Household Matters," and a last entry – quite appropriate to the other end of all the enthusiastic eating – a description and diagram of a venerable country septic system, a long sloping barrow stone work chamber with good access for the tree roots that will do the work of transformation.
 
When you've gotten through this book, look up Hartley’s Made in England (1939), which tells how things were made in the countryside, of wood, straw, stone, clay, leather, wool... She is a sort of chatty, scholarly Eric Sloane, delighting in the relation between the material at hand, the design and the makers.

– Beedy Parker