A year of eating locally

Acclaimed author Barbara Kingsolver discusses the sexiness of gardening, the relationship between activism and art, and the allure of homegrown asparagus.

By Meredith Maran

Read more: Life, Eat and Drink, Food and Travel

April 30, 2007 | Barbara Kingsolver published her first work of advocacy journalism at age 9, when her Op-Ed, "Why We Need a New Elementary School," helped pass a local school bond. She put writing aside to get a master's degree in evolutionary biology, which led to a job as a science writer, which led to a career as a freelance journalist. Journalism led to fiction; the rest is history.

"The Bean Trees," Kingsolver's first novel, was published in 1988 to great acclaim. With 2 million copies sold, it remains in print. Eleven others followed; all told, Kingsolver's titles have sold 7 million copies. Few American writers have managed to so seamlessly merge their radical politics and commercial success. "If we can't, as artists, improve on real life," Kingsolver says, "we should put down our pencils and go bake bread." Indeed, in her new book, "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life," she does both.

Part memoir, part investigative journalism, part cookbook, "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" is co-authored by Kingsolver's environmental scientist husband, Steven Hopp, and their then-19-year-old daughter, Camille. Together they tell the story of the year the family spent eating only food produced on or near their southwest Virginia farm. The central narrative rings with Kingsolver's characteristic biting humor; Hopp's sidebars focus on the industry and science of food production. Camille's passionate essays, informed by youthful idealism and by her sharp intelligence, also include meal plans and recipes.

Kingsolver spoke to Salon from her farm about the interplay between activism and her art, writing in different genres, and the pleasures and pitfalls of writing about -- and with -- your family.

What made you choose the "American eating disorder," as you call it, as the focus of "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle"?

Surely it's normal for an artist's personal passions and artistic expression to coincide. Most of my books have been about the complex ways an individual depends on community. Having grown up in a farming economy, I'm fascinated by the subtle antipathies expressed by our country's urban culture against rural concerns. I'm interested in how that disconnection translates into today's disastrous food policies and dangerous eating habits. A lot of important conflicts of our time fall into place around the subject of food production and consumption. It made perfect sense to write about it.

Your descriptions of days spent harvesting and canning tomatoes, killing and dressing chickens and turkeys, were exhausting just to read -- not exactly the relaxed-country-living fantasy. How does the labor and stress of farm life compare to that of the writing life?

Some of the long days we described in the book were extraordinary, rather than routine: Obviously, harvesting animals is a once-in-a-lifetime event (for them, at least), and canning tomatoes in August is kind of the gardener's World Series. But in the day-to-day, farm work is stress relief for me. At the end of the day, I love having this other career -- my anti-job -- that keeps me in shape and gives me control over a vegetal domain.

Sometimes I see people at the gym bench-pressing until they turn purple, or running five miles in the rain after work, and I think to myself, "Who could push themselves that hard? Not me!" And yet, walking to the garden with a hoe feels like a tryst with a lover. I adore working up a sweat on a sunny day among the sweet potatoes. I love having used every muscle I own, making food for my family. That process is deeply compelling, probably coded into our DNA.

I never thought I'd get a laugh out of a botanical description of asparagus, but thanks to you, I did.

Hooray, that's my goal: to write pages a reader will want to keep turning. I'm a storyteller, not a minister.

Do you consider yourself an artist first, activist second, or vice versa?

When I sit down to write, I consider myself an artist. I'm consumed by craft -- choosing the word with the right mouth feel, reading sentences aloud to sublimate the rhythm, making flow charts of plot, working backward to plant the seeds for a perfectly revealed ending. When I attend a PTA meeting with a plan to reduce the school's carbon footprint, then I'm an activist. It's different work, with more direct expectations and a simpler vocabulary.

Do you think your commercial success has given you more freedom to write on subjects that might not otherwise find an audience?

I've never spent 10 seconds thinking about success -- 20 years ago, or now. Every time I start a new book, I'm thinking, "Oh boy, nobody's going to want to read this one." Seriously, look at my topics: child abuse; imperialism; the value of predators in biological systems; children bitten by snakes in Africa. Six years ago when I dreamed up this latest project, the world was all dot-com fortunes, virtual communities, and procuring every earthly thing anonymously out of the ether. Local food economies? Oh, brother. Imagine my surprise, now, to be releasing this book to a nation that's suddenly extremely excited about local food economies. What a shock, to be trendy.

Next page: "If you eat, you belong to some kind of food chain"