In The Ethics of Eating, narrator Krista Tippett interviews Barbara Kingsolver, the author of "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle." Kingsolver spent a year with her family on a revolutionary experiment; they decided to grow and harvest their own food on their small Southwest Virginian farm. As Kingsolver was talking to Tipppett, she claimed, “she could see Global Warming staring it in the face” in her Tuscan, Arizona community.
So she, her husband, her elder daughter, and her youngest daughter, moved to a small farm in the Southwestern region of Virginia, where Kingsolver and her family, for a year, grew and produced their own meats and crops. Locavores, as they call themselves, depend on the local crop around them in order to sustain themselves. For Kingsolver, her family had an abundance of vegetables. As she said in her book during the harvest of July, “The harvest was bountiful and the labors were blooming endless.” She would harvest baskets and basketfuls of tomatoes, onions, beets, peppers, okra, and sweet corn in one day alone.
With meat, she described the harvesting process with the notion of, “eating a meat that met this day’s dawn by crowing.” She raised the chickens, turkeys, and roosters that she killed. Instead of calling it killing an animal for food, Kingsolver describes it as “harvesting,” saying that the animal is able to achieve its final glory out on the pasture and that an animal doesn’t want to grow old to be 100.
As Kingsolver describes later, it gave her wonder in being able to grow her own food. As she looks at the situation now, we are eating food that we do not know originated from. We do not know the costs to produce our food or the suffering and inequality that some people had to endure to bring that food to our table. We do not know the natural resources of the land it took to bring the food my kitchen. It seemed that Kingsolver described us as ignorant towards our own food consumption.
Kingsolver describes the book as a, “certain path home.” Returning from the society that is ignorant in its consumption of natural resources and food, Barbara and her family returned back to a basic human instinct, living off of the land; a notion that was as recent as the 19th century. With Kingsolver’s book, her message to her audience is simple, become aware of what you eat. Is it good for my body? Where does it come? What did it take to produce? As we ask these questions, think of Kingsolver and her small, Virginian farm.
