Eggleston's Review of "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle"

From Rich Eggleston (emphasis added by Terry):

I recently picked up Barbara Kingsolver's book, "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life," a back-to-our-roots look at industry-driven, petroleum and other chemical based agriculure, that shakes its head at how far America has been led down a path chosen by the agribusiness community, not a bunch of people you'd want your kids associating with.

The book explores how Americans in particular have chosen Big Macs over shepherd's pie, and in the course of doing so we've brought down on ourselves all kinds of health problems. If you want to know what health problems, read the book. They're too depressing to repeat here.

By focusing on a family's year-long adventure away from America's bad food habits, the book somehow avoids being overly judgmental and preachy. It's evangelical, true, but the evangelizing is below the surface of a narrative that flows from asparagus to zucchini, a time for every vegetable under heaven.

Being by nature a political beast who is losing my patience with a lot of today's policies that seem to cater to Wall Street instead of Elm Street, I tend to look for the villains lurking behind the gingham curtains in the kitchen.

And I find them aplenty: the folks who not only took the bread out of bread (replacing it with air), but the taste out of tomatoes and the nutrition out of a host of factory-farmed plants and animals. Kingsolver calls the chain of events "The Case of the Murdered Flavor."

When our friends in agribusiness were through murdering flavor and neutering nutrition, they put the result in microwaveable containers and added enough chemicals to give any particular food a shelf life approximating the half life of radium.

This enabled them to put farmers on an economic treadmill, running as fast as they can to stay in place so they can barely afford higher pesticide and chemical fertilizer costs. Only 19 cents of every food dollar ends up in the farmer's pocket, according to an aside on page 208 of the book.

No wonder farmers are hurting. The government responds by directing nearly three-quarters of farm subsidies to corn and soybean producers, who produce animal food, not people food, the book notes. The subsidies total some $80 billion a year when you factor in transportation, according to Kingsolver's husband, Steven L. Hopp, who provided some of the grim statistics.

Ain't this a great country? And I still have two pages of the notes I wrote on the book to sift through. I'm somewhat proud to have written this junior diatribe (The Fitchburg Star will get the fullblown version) after having eaten a true locavore's supper: lamb chops purchased at the farmer's market in Phillips yesterday and corn from a little ways down Highway 13. The green beans came from Michigan, though. All brought to Dane County at the end of a glorious week in the northwoods.

I somehow escaped tomatoes from our garden in Fitchburg, but I'm sure I'll have to pay for my sin of omission.

Rich Eggleston