42 pages • 1 hour read
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
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Themes
Local Eating
The main theme of the book is local eating; it is also the main argument of the book. Kingsolver explores different food-related topics and advocates for things like healthy eating, sustainable eating, and even ethical eating. However, she gathers all of these concerns together—health, sustainability, ethics—and makes the ultimate case that if you eat local, these concerns take care of themselves.
Local eating is, by nature, healthier because a local diet automatically cuts out processed foods, which are the majority of the empty calories Americans consume. Processed food and industrially produced items were supposed to “make food cheaper and available to more people. Instead, it has helped more of us become less healthy” (19).
Next, a local diet almost guarantees that its food comes from sustainable, small farms, simply because it would not be profitable for industrial farms to produce such small yields and only sell it within a few miles’ radius. For this reason, Kingsolver argues, “locally-grown; is a denomination whose meaning is incorruptible” (123). In terms of eco-friendliness, being a locavore also cuts out the huge fuel cost associated with buying and consuming food from far-flung areas. Additionally, local food is more likely to come from heirloom plants, untouched by genetic modification and harmful pesticides.
Third, without the influence of industrial farms and the conglomerates that control them, local eating is also ethically responsible. Outside the fuel cost, the locavore can be confident that his or her food came from or grew up (in the case of animals) responsibly and that the purchase of this food will go to support a farmer directly.
Finally, Kingsolver concludes that local eating is also good eating. She spends time explaining how locavores benefit from eating food at its most flavorful, its most delicious. And since locavores must usually cook at home, it is also food for the spirit, as the act of cooking nourishes the soul.
Food as an Industry
Kingsolver wrote this book chiefly because eating wholesome, local food has become such a foreign concept in America that the youngest generations have very little idea of the seasonality of plants at all. It is precisely because this lifestyle has fallen out of the culture that she has written what would otherwise be an ordinary account of one family’s year in food.
The root of the problem—the reason that American culture has “forgotten” how to eat local—is that food has become an industry. An insanely profitable industry for the six companies that “control 98 percent of the world’s seed sales” (51).
Over several decades, these conglomerates took over much of the farming industry, prioritizing the most profitable crops. As a result, “70 percent of all our midwestern agricultural land shifted gradually into single-crop corn or soybean farms” (14). Again in the name of profit, “most standard vegetable varieties sold in stores have been bred for uniform appearance, mechanized harvest, convenience, […] and tolerance for hard travel” (48). Health is not a consideration. Flavor is not a consideration. What is good for people and for the earth is not a consideration either. For these corporations, there is only profit.
The reason that Americans did not protest this shift is that “the Green Revolution of the 1970s promised that industrial agriculture would make food cheaper and available to more people. Instead, it has helped more of us become less healthy” (19). A famously overworked society, the promise of convenience convinced many to sacrifice other concerns.
Kingsolver’s book therefore serves as a manifesto against the idea that food—that thing necessary for life—is nothing but a profit machine for mega-corporations that hold patents on plant genes and pollute soil and groundwater with poisons.
Farming in the U.S.
Kingsolver is the daughter of farmers and so devotes time to exploring the modern state of farming in the US, specifically the state of the small family farm. Just as industrialization caused many produce varieties to disappear from American diets, it is also causing small family farms to disappear. In fact, “Over the last decade our country has lost an average of 300 farms a week” (113). She calls modern farming “people trying to keep work and homes together, versus conglomerates that scoop up a customer’s money and move it out of town to a corporate bank account” (151-52).
The theme of modern farming plays out in her exploration of rural life versus urban life, and the separation that has existed between the two forever. In her words: “the country tradition of mistrusting outsiders may be unfairly applied, but it’s not hard to understand. For much of U.S. history, rural regions have been treated essentially as colonial property of cities” (209). It is this same idea that rural farms are commodities of urban cities that perhaps made it easier for city folk to ignore the industrial destruction of the small family farm.
Still, Kingsolver includes numerous accounts of people still working small farms. Each account seems to say that since “a self-sufficient farming community has survived here, it remains a possibility elsewhere” (166). It can happen, if America as a culture were to support them simply by eating local.
Finally, Kingsolver makes the argument that humans have an innate desire to grow things. That “it is mixed up in our DNA. Agriculture is the oldest, most continuous livelihood in which humans have engaged” (178). She appeals to this sense and encourages people to start their own gardens. Like the book as a whole, the information about farming is meant to educate but also to inspire.
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