Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

The Kingsolver family had spent years living in Tucson, Arizona, a desert city where food arrives on trucks from hundreds, even thousands of miles away. Fresh produce in January? No problem. Strawberries in December? Available year-round. But Barbara Kingsolver, her husband Steven Hopp, and their daughters Camille and Lily had grown uneasy with this arrangement. They knew where their food came from in only the vaguest sense—somewhere far away, shipped in by someone they'd never meet.

So they made a radical decision. They moved.

In the spring, the family packed up their Tucson home and relocated to a farm in southern Appalachia. Steven had owned the property for twenty years—"a farmhouse, barn, orchards and fields"—and now it would become the site of an ambitious experiment. For an entire year, they would attempt to feed themselves "animals and vegetables whose provenance we really knew." Their highest shopping goal, Kingsolver writes, was "to get our food from so close to home, we'd know the person who grew it. Often that turned out to be us."

The mission had two main drivers. First, they wanted to know exactly where their food came from—to understand the soil it grew in, the hands that harvested it, the animals that provided it. Second, they wanted to reduce the petroleum in their food chain. As Kingsolver later explains, the average American consumes about four hundred gallons of oil per year just from food transportation. The family saw this as unsustainable, both for the planet and for their own sense of integrity.

The book that emerged from this experiment is not a simple memoir. It shifts between personal narrative, political manifesto, and academic exploration. Kingsolver herself wrote most of it, but Steven contributed essays on sustainability and farming policy, while Camille—then a teenager—wrote about her perspective and included recipes. The book, like the experiment it describes, became a family affair.

The family didn't step blindly into this challenge. Kingsolver grew up on a farm in Kentucky, the daughter of farmers who understood the cycles of planting and harvest. She held a master's degree in evolutionary biology, giving her a scientist's appreciation for natural processes. Steven had owned the Appalachian farm for two decades, maintaining the orchards and fields. Both daughters were on board, though Camille would leave for college midway through the year, creating its own complications.

Still, the move itself was a shock. Tucson to Appalachia meant trading dry heat for humid summers, cactus for hardwood forests, supermarket convenience for the reality of growing your own food. The farm came with a barn, orchards, and fields that had been planted by the previous family, the Webbs, who had lived there since 1901. The land held history—old goat pens where morel mushrooms now grew, carefully cultivated fruit trees, soil that had fed families for generations.

The family's decision to eat locally for a year was, in many ways, an attempt to reverse a century of American food culture. Kingsolver traces how, after World War II, industrial processes developed for war turned toward agribusiness. Chemical fertilizers created surpluses of specific crops like corn and soybeans. This was profitable, so "70 percent of all our midwestern agricultural land shifted gradually into single-crop corn or soybean farms." The government enacted legislation favoring huge industrial farms. Over-processed foods made from these crops became the American standard.

"The Green Revolution of the 1970s promised that industrial agriculture would make food cheaper and available to more people," Kingsolver writes. "Instead, it has helped more of us become less healthy."

Americans accepted this shift partly because convenience had become a cultural value. Why wait for asparagus in spring when you could have it shipped from Peru in January? Why grow tomatoes when you could buy them year-round? But this convenience came at a cost—not just in petroleum, but in taste, nutrition, and the loss of agricultural knowledge that previous generations took for granted.

Kingsolver points out that "most people of my grandparents' generation had an intuitive sense of agricultural basics: when various fruits and vegetables come into season, which ones keep through the winter, how to preserve others." This knowledge had largely vanished. The family's experiment was partly an attempt to recover it.

The book that chronicles this year is, in Kingsolver's words, "an attempt to prove—at least to ourselves—that a family living on or near green land need not depend for its life on industrial food." But it's also an invitation to readers, whether they live on farms or in city apartments, to consider where their food comes from and what it costs—in fuel, in health, in the loss of cultural knowledge that once connected humans to the land that feeds them.

The family's move from Tucson to Appalachia set the stage for a year that would challenge their habits, their patience, and their assumptions about what it means to eat well. They would face cravings for out-of-season fruit, learn to preserve summer's bounty for winter, raise turkeys that had forgotten how to mate, and discover that the hungriest months were not as hungry as they'd feared.

But first, they had to wait for the asparagus to come up.

What happens when a family accustomed to year-round convenience must learn to eat only what grows within a few miles of their home? What do you do when you crave fresh fruit in March and the only options are rhubarb and patience?