I scored a library hold on an audiobook of Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle as part of the Farm Kitchen #1 Know Your Food badge. I expected this to be an Appalachian endurance version of the "Apocalypse Grow Challenge" attempted for a month out of San Diego in 2021 or of UK's Huw Richard's lab notes published in Self Sufficiency Garden. In fact, these might have been inspired by Kingsolver, who published 17 years prior. My Goodreads reviews reminded me I had read this 10 years after publication (2017). While I wouldn't say this is a reference caliber book you will want to reread frequently, I still was able to pick up a few additional hints on my second read. My overall impression with the content was that it has aged remarkably well, there aren't any glaringly fanatical sections to leave me shaking my head and thinking "wrong side of history with that one."
Audiobook was the ideal format because it allows you work through your own household chores while listening to Kingsolver's family's ethical deliberations about their own household chores and food culture in their own voices, interspersed with delightful farm noises at chapter breaks. Audiobook also helped highlight that this book has 3 authors, each reading their segments in their own voices (Kingsolver, her husband "science sidebars," and elder daughter "recipes and teen perspective"). This version was an interview with the author afterwards. In it, she had helpful perspective on the writing process. For instance, when writing pure fiction (which she has gone on to earn Pulitzer prizes for), she equates to a west coast desert garden. You can create what you want from scratch and water intensely to get it to flourish. To write a narrative around a non-fiction science project such as this undertaking, you have to employ the east coast approach of weeding without mercy until you have just the plants you want growing in your plot.
She also shared that her family weren't newbies undertaking this project-- they had both grown up on farms (even if they acquainted with artichokes relatively late in life), they had been contemplating this project for 6-7 years prior to beginning it and had a publisher signed on for the deal. This helped curb my sense of overwhelm that they were able to accomplish so much in their first year. I was so impressed at their discipline in recording their harvest and the equivalent cost in local produce. The few things we do grow are successful mostly because they are so compelling (strawberries, blueberries, peas, apples), we snack on them in the yard. There is no taking them in, weighing them, and calculating what their going value at a farmer's market would be first.
While she was so disciplined in her book-keeping, I respected that they were not purists across all domains and freely admited to buying coffee, wheat, and emergency rations. Their family stayed the same weight at the end of the project when a more strictly adherent colleague reported losing 15 pounds on a hyper local diet.
While I'm not quite ready to bite off this big of an Eat Local project for myself, it did inspire me to add a few extra projects to my hopper:
*Visit localharvest.org and determine if there are other local farmer's markets to explore. Yes, there are 3 within 2-6 mile radius -- Orange Sat 9-1, Irvine district Tues 9-1, and (our regular) old town Tustin Wed 9-1. My goals are to visit all three and to take some notes on the distance sellers are traveling to get there. Kingsolver suggests "local" might be as far as 250 miles away in desert areas but more like 100 miles away in the central valley.
*Prioritize products with fewer ingredients. It hadn't occurred to me that if a processed food has several different ingredients, those would have needed to be shipped to the factory, accumulating food miles, before then being shipped to the store as a convenience food.
*Think about how much water you are shipping. Steven makes a compelling argument that shipping a dried produce item is more sustainable than shipping it in whole form with all the water weight it contains.
*Check out some of Kingsolver's fiction (specifically Demon Copperhead and Poisonwood Bible). It looks like she did eventually get back around to co-authoring with her family to write a book with her daughter about Coyotes that I could possibly read with my daughter...
*Do my own research on still-open questions:
-Are standards for "organic" in internationally differently enforced than in the US? Which country has more rigorous standards? (food miles aside)
-What milestone would we choose for a local food challenge? (she used asparagus, Jefferson had an "earliest pea" wager going in Monticello, what is the SoCal equivalent?)
-What are the SoCal "most egregious" imports to avoid or focus on eating only in season? Bananas were much-maligned in Appalachia, but we have stands growing around our house that produce more than we know what to do with. Perhaps some of the fruits that require extensive chill hours?
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