Kingsolver’s “food year” highlighted how separated we have become from the food we eat. I don’t buy them any other time they are worth the wait. One trip in from the garden to make tomato sandwiches with the ones we had grown taught us that the only tomatoes worth eating are fresh tomatoes in season. Here in New England planting doesn’t happen until Memorial Day, so we had to wait for the fruits of our labor until almost Labor Day. As the family’s year in food begins to unfold, what emerges is a call to a food ethic, making the case for restraint as a virtue: '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, ignoring how our sustenance is cheapened by wholesale desires' (31).Ībout six summers ago I planted my first tomatoes in our back yard. The younger daughter shows her entrepreneurial spirit with her burgeoning egg business. Though Kingsolver writes the bulk of the memoir, her husband peppers the book with scientific articles and her college-aged daughter shares anecdotes and recipes. Yet, the story she tells is informative without being didactic, personal without being overly sentimental, and real. They already owned the farm and the royalties alone from Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible must have afforded them a comfortable lifestyle. The challenge seemed admirable, but I was still a bit skeptical. As a part of the move, they decided they would eat only what they could grow or find grown or made within one hundred miles of their house.

When I picked up Barbara Kingsolver’s new memoir, I expected Walden with a family: she was moving with her husband (a professor of environmental science) and two daughters from their home in the Southwest back to his family farm in Virginia.

They will soon move from their home south of Boston to Durham, North Carolina, where Ginger will pastor a UCC and Milton will cook and write. Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (New York: Harper Collins, 2007), 384pp.Ī guest book review by Milton Brasher-Cunningham, a writer and chef who is married to a minister in the United Church of Christ.

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