Join the Heifer community!

Barbara Kingsolver

World Ark readers may be familiar with Barbara Kingsolver from her best-selling books, The Poisonwood Bible and Prodigal Summer. In her latest best-seller, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Kingsolver turns her eyes to a subject very close to home: the food she eats and the land she lives on.

Interview by Anna Lappé, author of Hope’s Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet and Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen

WA: Your new book begins in a convenience store in Arizona and ends on a farm in Virginia. You describe the journey as a choice to “eat deliberately” for one year. What do you mean by that?

Kingsolver: We wanted to think carefully about the sources of our providence in a world in which where our food comes from is increasingly unknown, even unknowable. Our food system is not good for us and it’s not good for the producers either—it exploits farmers and consumers. We wanted to walk away from that industrial pipeline of food and reconnect with our own local food economy. So we made a pledge to eat only the vegetables, fruits, dairy products and meats that were grown in our own place—in our immediate region, and in many cases on our own farm and in our own backyard. The point was to look at where our food was coming from and to make the choices as locally as we could.

WA: What were some of your specific motivations for writing this book? Why does food matter so much to you?

Kingsolver: I felt like this is the time to write this book. Most of us understand the world is at peak oil production. We are looking at a future in which cheap fossil fuel and all the things it can buy are running out.

It also seems to me that we still have good options. We can take control of our food economies and celebrate and strengthen our local food, instead of relying on this other system that uses an enormous amount of fossil fuels. It’s a system that’s extremely profitable for the shippers, packagers, processors and oil companies. It concentrates the money in the hands of these companies, but it’s extremely unsustainable. We can choose whether we re-create a more sustainable system, or whether
we let corporations drive this system into the ground and leave
us with nothing.

Food is one of the rare things that we have to buy or procure. We could all do without buying clothes for a year and still get by, but we could not go a week without food. If the bottom drops out of the imported tennis shoe market we’ll probably be okay, but we can’t survive without food.

WA: You named your book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. What were some of your moments of miracle on this journey?

Kingsolver: My titles always contain an element of surprise or cognitive dissonance and also offer a kind of key to unlocking what the book is really about. Usually that key opens another door in every chapter. I really want the readers to decide for themselves what the miracle is; it may be different for everyone.

For me, the biggest miracle is the fact that this project, which may have seemed to us in the beginning to be an exercise in deprivation, very quickly guided us through a paradigm shift. Very quickly, we came to see this way of living with a sense of gratitude.

We moved from beginning each meal by asking, “What do I feel like?” to asking, “What do we have?” We would look at what’s coming in—what’s wonderful and abundant right now—and work from there. It was very valuable for our family, and it’s a wonderful way to live. It’s a paradigm shift that all of us could probably use in our lives.

WA: A lot of people have the impression that eating food that’s good for you is somehow a chore or a bore. But you seem to be celebrating a lot in this book and having a really good time. 

Kingsolver: Oh it’s so true. We so often presume that doing the right thing is going to be a drag, whether it’s eating food that’s better for our bodies or making changes in our lives that will help preserve the environment. Our first response is often to presume that it’s going to be hard and miserable. In this case, it’s been one big Hallelujah!

I think this has a lot to do with returning to what is normal for our species, for any animal. It’s not normal to rely on invisible people on the other side of the world for our survival. Ever since humans ate their first meal, we ate what was grown nearby. So it feels so good to come home to ourselves and eat the way we were made to eat and live the way we were made to live: in communities that sustain themselves and rely on one another, communities that make their transactions in a handshake deal.

Food is the heart of every culture, and my country’s culture has lost its heart. That is a very painful truth. We’re feeding kids food that’s making them sick, that’s leaving them with a shorter life span than their parents. That’s brutal.

WA: This book was clearly a family project. Was it hard to convince your kids and husband to get on board?

Kingsolver: Our family has always prepared and eaten meals together. My kids are accustomed to eating healthy food that comes from nearby, so this felt pretty normal for us, to tell you the truth. But with this project we formalized the deal. We made this public pledge. It’s similar to a marriage ceremony that attaches you publicly to a commitment. It’s not a commitment about giving up an old way of life, but about embracing a new way of life that you know you want to live. By signing a book contract, by saying we’re really going to do this, we formalized the commitment. It helped us to push ourselves to do more than we had done previously.

Read more from the interview with Barbara Kingsolver