Category: Non-Fiction Reviews

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver

 
A family moves from its home in Arizona to a farm in southern Appalachia and, by trial and error, build a new life reflecting on the age old saying: “We are what we eat.” Throughout this work are detailed accounts of the art of growing vegetables, fruit trees, and raising animals for human consumption. Barbara Kingsolver asks:
 

Will North Americans ever have a food culture to call our own? Can we find or make up a set of rituals, recipes, ethics, and buying habits that will let us love our food and eat it too? Some signs point to “yes.” Better food – more local, more healthy, more sensible – is a powerful new topic of the American conversation.” … 

This book tells the story of what we learned or didn’t, what we ate, or couldn’t, and how our family was changed by one year of deliberately eating food produced in the same place where we worked, loved our neighbors, drink the water, and breathe the air.

Daughter Camille and husband Steven L.  Hopp contribute throughout the text with collaborating essays and mouthwatering recipes. Some of Kingsolver’s discourses surround controversy all topics such as global climate change;  CAFO’s, or concentrated animal feeding operations, commonly known as factory farms; genetic modification, currently known as GMO, or genetically modified organisms: fair trade: and pesticides , to name a few. Kingsolver’s emphasis is on growing our own produce in our backyard and becoming regular customers a farmers’ markets, whose vendors sell local and organic produce.

One section of the book is devoted almost exclusively to the authors’ curiosity and eventual observing and caring for the family’s Bourbon Red turkeys and their offspring, which is quite comical and interesting. Several chapters give accounts of the family’s endeavors of seed saving, harvesting, and freezing are canning items when the season has passed.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is filled with helpful anecdotes, such as what to eat when the food is out of season. It is not preachy, but commonsensical and witty. There is an extensive references and resource section at the back of the book for additional research. And the authors have added a handy online site with recipes specific to the four seasons. Check it out here.

—Laurie Jones

Grandma’s Backyard

While reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Barbara Kingsolver’s book detailing her family’s attempt to eat only locally grown food for an entire year, I was reminded of my grandmother’s back yard where she maintained a chicken coop.
 
In the ‘40s and early ‘50s, we lived next door to Gram in Ashland, Kansas, a rural town of about 1,400 persons in southwest Kansas, close to the Oklahoma border. It certainly wasn’t unusual for people there to have chicken coops, where they grew chickens and had a ready supply of fresh eggs. Most everyone also had gardens, butter churns, and kept locally grown meat at the local ‘locker’.
 
To get ready for the evening meal, Gram would head out to the coop, grab the closest chicken, and after taking it out of the coop, would violently wring its neck, breaking the head off. After releasing the chicken, it would literally ‘run around like a chicken with its head cut off’, spewing blood all over the grass.
 
It was always a spectacle lasting several minutes, and eventually the chicken would run out of steam and drop over dead.  Then she would pick it up and drop it into a boiling cauldron of water on the back porch.  After a few minutes then, it would be removed—ready for plucking. I often had the undesirable chore of removing the stinking feathers and bringing the denuded carcass into the kitchen for cooking.

Today, it’s much less exciting – and cleaner.  We go to the HyVee meat counter and pick up a package of pre-cut chicken. — Ken Johnson

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou writes beautifully and from the heart in the autobiography of her sometimes happy but often painful childhood. When their parents divorced, she and her brother, Bailey, were sent to live with their grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. She was just 5 years old, Bailey, 4.

Their grandmother was an exceptional woman, kind but strict. The children helped in the general store she owned and ran in the small, tight-knit all-Black community.

Angelou tells of going to visit her mother in St. Louis and being raped by her mother’s live-in boyfriend. The 8-year-old child was so traumatized that she refused to speak for several years. She recovered when a teacher, who understood her love of books, encouraged her to read out loud.

Her teenage yeas were difficult. Angelou grew to be six feel tall, had no self-confidence, believed she was ugly, and had been stung more than once by bigotry.  In her late teens, she visited her mother again, this time in California. As a result of a one-time encounter, which she initiated to try and reassure herself that she was “lovable,” she became pregnant.  The result was “her greatest gift,” her son, Guy.

Angelou went on to become a renowned writer of both books and poetry. She wrote and read a poem at President Bill Clinton’s inauguration. All of her works are written in a direct, personal, sometimes humorous style. She was a civil rights activist, sometimes working alongside Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. She also was an educator, a playwright, a singer, composer and dancer; she earned numerous honorary doctorates. Angelou died in May of 2014.

—Gail Allen