Asked & Answered Nov/Dec07

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Does choosing local foods hurt poor farmers overseas?

It’s a good question, and the answer is very good news: as we strengthen our local food economy here in the United States, we are helping to break some of the chains that are exploiting farmers in Third World countries. We break the chains of debt, chains of obligation, and chains of international trade pressures that are preventing Third World farmers from growing food to feed themselves.

My husband sums this up well: The world’s farms right now are producing enough to overfeed every person on the globe, yet still 800 million are hungry. That’s not because their countries don’t grow food, it’s because the hungry don’t have the money to buy it. Industrial production is efficient at producing commodities that industry markets to people who already have money, who already have enough food. Industrial agriculture does not feed the hungry per se, it’s not organized that way. It’s poverty—not agriculture—that causes hunger.

The Green Revolution made all of these promises that industrial agriculture would make food cheaper and available to more people. And intuitively, as a culture, we’re still buying that. But it’s turned out not to be true. Industrial agriculture has helped to make more people in the world become less healthy. Now, eating too many calories of poor quality food is a bigger problem than under-nutrition.

Most of the farmers in poor countries are not farm owners, they are farm laborers, often barely making a living wage, using very toxic chemicals, working on land under control of international corporations that has been taken out of the service of the local food economy. Soybeans are a good example. In Brazil, there are a couple of mega corporations that grow soy on a large scale. To do so they are clearing rainforest, destroying villages and removing land from the possibility of ever growing food for Brazilians.

Most of us understand that buying cheap clothing made by children in Asian sweatshops is not doing those children a favor. The exact same thing is true if we’re buying cheap food from far away. Our consciousness of agriculture has been lagging behind, but it’s catching up.

It’s also interesting that the average American citizen is more aware of kids in sweatshops than they are about U.S. farmers. We have poor children in our country who live in our rural areas, because people are not buying food from the United States. It’s time to attend to our own farmers.

What can we do to connect with where our food comes from even if we don’t live on a farm?

People who live in cities are actually in a better position to eat locally than people living in rural areas. The fastest growing piece of our agriculture economy is small, diversified family farms on the outskirts of cities. Farmers markets, community-supported agriculture farms and farm-to-table programs are all growing at unprecedented rates. There are more than 4,000 farmers markets in this country and that number goes up every time I check!

The grass-fed meat industry is expanding as people understand the health and environmental benefits of supporting farmers who turn grass into food. Solar power is an infinitely renewable resource and it makes so much more sense to have animals on pasture versus feedlots. In many parts of the country, keeping land in pasture is much better environmentally than tilling it every year to grow soy or corn or other crops. For when you leave grass in place, instead of tilling, you have those deep roots keeping the land intact.

People who shop in supermarkets can also look at labels and learn whether the apples they’re about to buy come from their own state or New Zealand. Every part of the country has something that it produces well locally. We can all learn to find out what it is and celebrate it in our cuisine. All of these choices make a difference .

We wrote this book as a valentine to our urban readers to help share with them the miraculous process of the food we eat: how food grows, when it grows, how it’s harvested. The more you know about these processes, the more than you can become engaged in your local food economies—wherever you live.

Do you feel like there is a shift in consciousness across the country around food?

There’s no doubt that the sustainable food movement is exploding right now. It’s in people’s awareness in a way I never dreamed it would be.

When I was on the book tour, I discovered every city in this country has an exploding local foods scene. It’s different in Chicago, Dallas or San Francisco, but the movement is undeniable. We are looking at change. We have no choice. The encouraging thing is that so many people seem excited about making this change happen in a way that’s good for our neighborhoods and for the green spaces around our cities and that it is also moving with the tide of an international sense of responsibility.

Did connecting with your local food economy make you reflect differently on Heifer International?

I appreciate Heifer International for the same reasons that I wrote this book: Heifer International is a rare organization that really understands the importance of farming and sustainable agriculture. Heifer understands that people who have some control and engagement with their local food economies are the only ones who really have power and a future in this world. This goes for us and it goes for people everywhere in the world; it’s true in Africa, it’s true in India—and it’s true here.