October 2022
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
Discussion: Sunday, October 23rd, 6-7:30pm
This month we are reading Barbara Kingsolver's Animal Vegetable Miracle and discussing her family's experiment in growing and preparing their own food and consuming only locally grown products for an entire year.
Here are some questions to get you started. Feel free to bring any additional questions the book raised for you...
Kingsolver advocates the pleasures of seasonal eating, but she acknowledges that many people would view this as deprivation "because we've grown accustomed to the botanically outrageous condition of having everything always." Do you believe that our society can—or will— overcome the need for instant gratification in order to be able to eat seasonally? Did you get the sense that she and her family ever felt deprived in their eating options? Would you be able to eat only locally-grown food for a year without feeling deprived?
In what ways do Kingsolver's descriptions of the places she visited on her travels—Italy, New England, Montreal, and Ohio—enhance her portrayal of local and seasonal eating?
Kingsolver points out that eating what we want, when we want comes "at a price." The cost, she says, "is not measured in money, but in untallied debts that will be paid by our children in the currency of extinctions, economic unravelings, and global climate change." What responsibility do we bear for keeping the environment safe for future generations? How does eating locally factor into this? Locally-grown or organic? Which has a greater impact on protecting the environment?
"A majority of North Americans do understand, at some level, that our food choices are politically charged," says Kingsolver, "affecting arenas from rural culture to international oil cartels and global climate change." How do politics affect food production and consumption? What global ramifications are there for the food choices we make? How do we as consumers vote for the kind of society we want every time we make a choice about what to buy and where to shop?
"Marketing jingles from every angle lure patrons to turn our backs on our locally owned stores, restaurants, and farms," says Kingsolver. "And nobody considers that unpatriotic." How much of a role do the media play in determining what we eat and what we buy? What can we do to protect local businesses and diversified family farms? Did you see any connections between the issues raised by the book and the film Alcarras?
The writing of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle was a family affair, with Kingsolver's husband, Steven L. Hopp, contributing factual sidebars and her daughter, Camille Kingsolver, serving up commentary and recipes. Did you find that these additional elements enhanced the book? How so? What facts or statistics in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle surprised you the most?
Kingsolver says, "We're raising our children on the definition of promiscuity if we feed them a casual, indiscriminate mingling of foods from every season plucked from the supermarket." Whose responsibility is it to teach children healthy and sustainable eating habits? Parents? Schools? What initiatives do you know of to make children, especially in urban areas, more aware of where their food comes from? How successful are these initiatives in changng their eating habits?
Is the idea of living 100% self-sufficiently achievable (or even desirable)? Even if we cannot become totally self-sufficient, what steps can we take to become more so? In what ways, if any, have you changed your habits since reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle? What other steps would you like to take to modify your lifestyle with regard to living more sustainably?
If you are interested in food, I suggest reading some of Michael Pollan's work. His book Cooked has been made into a 4-part series available on Netflix with episodes on fermentation and bread making. (If you are a vegetarian you might want to skip the first episode).