(01:51) Works by Kingsolver

Barbara Kinsgolver is the author of bestselling novels, short stories, essays, and a volume of poetry. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is her first full-length, non-fiction narrative. Her 1998 novel, The Poisonwood Bible, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In 2000 she won a National Humanities Medal. Her works weave modern social, cultural, and political concerns through her narratives. In one biography, she describes how in her late twenties she discovered Doris Lessing, the British writer to whom she's sometimes compared: "I read the Children of Violence novels and began to understand how a person could write about the problems of the world in a compelling and beautiful way. And it seemed to me that was the most important thing I could ever do, if I could ever do that."

She is founder of the Bellwether Prize, a prize awarded biennially to a first novel that exemplifies "outstanding literary quality and a commitment to literature as a tool for social change." Of it, Kingsolver says "Fiction has a unique capacity to bring difficult issues to a broad readership on a personal level, creating empathy in a reader's heart for the theoretical stranger. Its capacity for invoking moral and social responsibility is enormous. Throughout history, every movement toward a more peaceful and humane world has begun with those who imagined the possibilities. The Bellwether Prize seeks to support the imagination of humane possibilities."

(02:33) "Like Rats Leaping Off the Burning Ship

Krista quotes from the opening pages of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, in which Kingsolver describes the day her family left the desert of Arizona for southern Appalachia.

"This was the end of May. Our rainfall since Thanksgiving has measured less than one inch. The cacti, denizens of deprivation, looked ready to pull up roots and hitch a ride if they could. The prickly pears waved good-bye with puckered, grayish pads. The tall, dehydrated saguaros stood around all teetery and sucked-in like very prickly supermodels. Even in the best of times desert creatures live on the edge of survival, getting by mostly on vapor and their own life savings. Now, as the southern tier of the U.S. states came into a third consecutive year of drought, people elsewhere debated how seriously they should take global warming. We were staring it in the face.

"Away went our little family, like rats leaping off the burning ship. It hurt to think about everything at once: our friends, our desert, old home, new home. We felt giddy and tragic as we pulled up at a little gas-and-go market on the outside edge of Tuscon. Before we set off to seek our fortunes we had to gas up, of course, and buy snacks for the road. We did have a cooler in the back seat packed with respectable lunch fare. But we had more than two thousand miles to go. Before we crossed a few state lines we'd need to give our car a salt treatment and indulge in some things that go crunch.

"This was the trip of our lives. We were ending our existence outside the city limits of Tucson, Arizona, to begin a rural one in southern Appalachia. We'd sold our house and stuffed the car with the most crucial things: birth certificates, books-on-tape, and a dog on drugs. (Just for the trip, I swear). All other stuff would come in the moving van. For better or worse, we would soon be living on a farm."

(05:10) Krista's Conversation with Wangari Maathai

In April 2006, Speaking of Faith produced "Planting the Future," a program with Nobel Peace Prize recipient and native Kenyan, Wangari Maathai, who was the first African woman to win the award. She's the founder of the Green Belt Movement — a grassroots organization that empowers African women to improve their lives and conserve the environment through planting trees and impeding the process of desertification.

(05:48) The Sun Belt

The Sun Belt is generally considered as the region comprising 15 southern states in the U.S. extending from Virginia and Florida in the southeast through Nevada in the southwest, and also including southern California. According to Census Bureau reports, "Nearly a century ago, in 1910, each of the 10 most populous cities was within roughly 500 miles of the Canadian border. The 2006 estimates show that seven of the top 10 — and three of the top five — are in states that border Mexico." Population increases are happening in large cities — three of the fastest growing centers being Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Fort Worth — and small cities of the "inner" Sun Belt.

(07:25) Transportation of Food and Fossil Fuels

How food finds its way to your plate was the topic of a November 2006 NPR Science Friday program. Host Ira Flatow's three guests — Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma, Worldwatch Institute senior researcher Brian Halweil, author of Eat Here: Reclaiming Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket, and Cornell University nutrition scientist Dr. Jennifer Wilkins — discussed food production and consumption and the business of agriculture. Here's an excerpt from the conversation.

Ira Flatow: You show an interesting illustration of the state of Iowa, which we all know is a great agricultural state, but the people buying the food there — none of it's local except maybe the corn.

Mr. Halweil: Right. The irony of the whole sort of center of the country, the Corn Belt, is that most of that corn and soybeans goes elsewhere, and those very productive agricultural counties end up importing most of their food. The folks at Iowa State University at the Leopold Center looked at a typical meal consumed in Iowa — some beef, some string beans, some carrots, some potatoes, berries for a pie, wheat for bread — and what they found is that most of those ingredients came from between 1,000 and 2,000 miles away, from as far away as Chile and mostly from California, even though Iowa is perfectly capable of raising all of those ingredients for the vast majority of the year.

And most importantly, what they found is that long-distance meal consumed 17 times as much energy in transportation as that same meal raised within 50 miles of the university itself.

So not only is it gobbling up a tremendous amount of money, but it's actually taking dollars out of the state, dollars that could be going to Iowa farmers.

Ira Flatow: And why isn't it grown there then? If you can do it, why not do it?

Mr. Halweil: Well, it gets back to this sort of economic calculus that defines global trade, that defines trade anywhere at this point. And that is, if a store in Iowa can find a sack of potatoes grown slightly cheaper than it would cost them to grow it in Iowa, they get it from wherever they can. And because fuel is relatively inexpensive or a relatively small part of that cost, we're willing to ship those potatoes from as far away as China.

And we don't really attach a lot of value right now to the fact that those potatoes might have been grown locally, which might mean that they're fresher and tastier. It also means that we're not causing all this pollution and congestion as a result of the energy use. And also means that we're keeping money in our local economy.

Ira Flatow: Dr. Wilkins, you write about fossil fuel consuming a huge portion of our food costs.

Dr. Wilkins: Well, it certainly does. Our food system is very fossil fuel-dependent and very heavily uses of fossil fuels. It's estimated that about 20 percent of our fossil fuel use is used in the entire food system, from production to getting food on our table.

For every calorie that we consume, about 10 calories of fossil fuel has been used to produce that.

Ira Flatow: You wrote an article in the Times-Union, the local newspaper in Albany, New York, saying food policies fail to spur good health. And you talk about something that sort of flies below the radar screen of most Americans, most politicians. And that is the legislation that sets up the farm bill. What goes on in the farm bill affects just about all kinds of things that we eat. Talk about what your concerns are.

Dr. Wilkins: Well — and this gets back to our concentration of supporting very few commodities, as opposed to supporting diversity and variety, which we promote in the dietary guidelines. So our dietary guidelines are very sound in what they're promoting in terms of eating a variety of fruits and vegetables and eating whole grains and, you know, a variety of different kinds of foods.

Yet our production system that we support with policy is very narrow in what it supports. And the Economic Research Service of the USDA has estimated that we would need to put in six million acres more in crop production to supply the kinds of foods, if people shifted to the dietary guidelines, and produce far fewer acres of corn and far fewer acres, about 10 million fewer acres of soybeans.

So we're producing foods that are then converted to being available as commodities to the food industry that then finds multiple uses for them. We have, you know — walk into a supermarket today and see nearly 40,000 items in the supermarket. Gives a really great impression of a lot of choice. But when you start really looking at the ingredients in a lot of the packaged foods and the highly processed foods that we have in the supermarket, you'll start seeing the same ingredients all over the place.

And high fructose corn syrup, which didn't exist before 1970, is now pervasive throughout our food system as is a lot of added fat from soybeans.

(07:25) Out-of-Season Food, A Luxury of the Wealthy

There are a handful of online resources describing the distinctive history of American food. The Smithsonian Institution currently has a traveling exhibition called "Key Ingredients: America by Food" that includes a timeline of 500 years of American eating. The July 2004 edition of ejournal USA, an online publication from the U.S. Department of State, includes a series of articles exploring how Americans prepare and consume food and what these traditions reveal about our culture.

(09:00) Locavores

The term "locavores" refers to people who eat only food grown or harvested from within 100 miles — a foodshed — of their home. The term reportedly was coined in August 2005 when four San Francisco women started the first "Eat Local Challenge" and launched a Web site. They were inspired by ecologist Gary Paul Nabham's 2002 book Coming Home to Eat that chronicles his Kingsolver-like experience to restrict himself to consuming native foods within 250 miles of his Arizona home. More recently, a Salon.com science writer found, surprisingly, that the transport of food over long distances can sometimes pollute less than locally grown and transported food.

(10:05) Organics and Elitism

The decision to purchase locally grown food and organic products can be a costly one. According to a study from the University of California-Davis, American families spend almost 20 percent more on healthy foods than those shoppers who don't. For lower income families, this can equate to 35-40 percent of their grocery bill. Christy Harrington examines why organic foods aren't affordable in a Grist magazine article, "Cost in Translation". And, Eating Well provides a helpful guide to determining the affordability, safety, and environmental friendliness of consuming organic products in "Organics: Are They Worth It?"

(10:50) Reading from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

In the chapter "Zucchini Larceny" from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Kingsolver writes about the bountiful harvest in July:

By mid-month we were getting a dozen tomatoes a day, that many cucumbers, our first eggplants, and squash in unmentionable quantities. A friend arrived one morning as I was tag-teaming with myself to lug two full bushel-baskets of produce into the house. He pronounced a benediction: "The harvest is bountiful and the labors few."

I agreed, of course, but the truth is I still had to go back to the garden that morning to pull about two hundred onions—our year's supply. They had bulbed up nicely in the long midsummer days and were now waiting to be tugged out of the ground, cured, and braided into the heavy plaits that would hang from our kitchen mantel and infuse our meals all through the winter. I also needed to pull beets that day, pick about a bushel of green beans, and slip paper plates under two dozen ripening melons to protect their undersides from moisture and sowbugs. In another week we would start harvesting these, along with sweet corn, peppers, and okra. The harvest was bountiful and the labors were blooming endless.

However high the season, it was important for us to remember we were still just gardeners feeding ourselves and occasional friends, not commercial farmers growing food as a livelihood. That is a whole different set of chores and worries. But in our family's "Year of Local," the distinction did blur for us somewhat. We had other jobs, but when we committed to the project of feeding ourselves (and reporting, here, the results), that task became a significant piece of our family livelihood. Instead of the normal modern custom of working for money that is constantly exchanged for food, we worked directly for food, skipping all the middle steps. Basically this was about efficiency. I told myself—and I still do, on days when the work seems as overwhelming as any second job. But most of the time that job provides rewards far beyond the animal-vegetable paycheck. It gets a body outside for some part of every day to work the heart, lungs, and muscles you wouldn't believe existed, providing a healthy balance to desk jobs that might otherwise render us chair potatoes. Instead of needing to drive to the gym, we walk up the hill to do pitchfork free weights, weed-pull yoga, and Hoe Master. No excuses. The weeds could win.

It is also noiseless in the garden: phoneless, meditative, and beautiful. At the end of one of my more ragged afternoons of urgent faxes from magazine editors or translators, copy that must be turned around on a dime, incomprehensible contract questions, and baffling requests from the IRS that are all routine parts of my day job, I relish the short commute to my second shift. Nothing is more therapeutic than to walk up there and disappear into the yellow-green smell of the tomato rows for an hour to address the concerns of quieter, more manageable colleague. Holding the soft, viny limbs as tender as babies' wrists, I train them to their trellises, tidy the mulch at their feet, inhale the oxygen of their thanks.

Like our friend David who meditates on Creation while cultivating, I feel lucky to do work that lets me listen to distant thunder and watch a nest of baby chickadees fledge from their hole in the fencepost into the cucumber patch. Even the smallest backyard garden offers emotional rewards in the domain of the little miracle. As a hobby, this one could be considered bird-watching with benefits.

(12:15) Hidden Costs of Foods

A June 21, 2007 TIME Magazine article, "The Rising Costs of Food," describes some of the hidden costs of food and why supermarket prices, while considered low, are on the rise.

The Financial Times also has a multimedia feature exploring the factors behind the recent rise in food prices —of which the rise in oil prices is just one cause. Their coverage also includes this interactive map (registration required) of economic and political tensions around the world that affect the cost of staple foods.

(12:35) The Farm Bill

The Farm Bill is federal legislation that's renewed every five years. The bill sets U.S. agriculture policy in matters ranging from crop subsidies to food stamps to conservation efforts. Its genesis was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal program that implemented agricultural policies to help rural America recover from the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. The 2007 Farm Bill finally passed on June 18, 2008, after a majority of Congress voted in favor of the bill. Previously, President George W. Bush criticized the revised bill in an address to the House of Representatives:

At a time of high food prices and record farm income, this bill lacks program reform and fiscal discipline. It continues subsidies for the wealthy and increases farm bill spending by more than $20 billion, while using budget gimmicks to hide much of the increase. It is inconsistent with our objectives in international trade negotiations, which include securing greater market access for American farmers and ranchers.

However, the President was unable to veto the latest version due to its support by more than two-thirds of both houses of Congress—the required amount of support needed to override a presidential veto. The Associated Press reported Democratic chairman of the House Agricultural Committee, Collin Peterson, as saying, "Particularly considering the serious concerns about rising food prices and severe flooding affecting crops in the Midwest, this Farm Bill provides a critical safety net for families and farmers."

The United States Deparment of Agriculture (USDA) reported that in 2004 and 2005 food and nutrition programs were the largest budget item that benefited 62 million people through food stamps, school lunches, and other nutrition programs. The second largest budget item was commodity subsidies — with over 80 percent going to corn, cotton, wheat, rice, and soybeans — benefitting approximately half a million farmers.

(14:04) Vegetable Bookmobile

Kingsolver mentions that a city near her home offers "a vegetable bookmobile" — a farmer's market on a school bus that sells vegetables in low-income neighborhoods. In West Oakland, California, People's Grocery has a similar venture in their "Mobile Market" that helps low-income people access healthier food options.

(15:30) Lack Strong Regional Traditions

Kingsolver says we lack regional traditions of food in American culture that anchor us to our place. Perhaps, but others note that there are many local food traditions that influence our mobile culture and international composition. The public radio program The Splendid Table with Lynne Rossetto Kasper features a weekly segment with Jan and Michael Stern who travel the United States eating distinctive cuisine with strong ethnic and cultural flare. The Smithsonian Institution currently has a traveling exhibit called "Key Ingredients: America by Food" that profiles the two key ingredients to American cuisine — regional traditions and international influences.

(15:37) "In Search of a Food Leviticus"

The primary themes of Leviticus, the third book of the Old Testament, involve instruction and laws for holiness and priestly practices, including rituals for sacrifice, food preparation, and regulations concerning cleanliness.

(20:43) "Different Deities Will Claim You"

Barbara Kingsolver devotes a chapter in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle to describing the events of a Saturday in September — harvest day — where "our plan for this gorgeous day was the removal of some of our animals from the world of the living into the realm of food," and her thoughts on the moral rules of animal harvesting. After her family and guests had harvested six roosters and four turkeys:

"And that was the end of a day's work. I hosed down the butcher shop and changed into more civilized attire (happy to see my wedding ring was still on) while everybody else set the big picnic table on our patio with plates and glasses and all the food in the fridge we'd prepared ahead. The meat on the rotisserie smelled really good, helping to move our party's mindset toward the end stages of the "cooking from scratch" proposition. Steven brushed the chicken skin with our house-specialty sweet-and-sour sauce and we uncorked the wine. At dusk, we finally sat down to feast on cold bean salad, sliced tomatoes with basil, blue potato salad, and meat that had met this day's dawn by crowing.

"We felt tired to our bones but anointed by life in a durable, companionable way, for at least the present moment. We the living take every step in tandem with death, naught but the sap that feeds the tree of heaven, whether we can see that or not. We bear it by the grace of friendship, good meals, and if we need them, talking turkey heads."

(29:47) Reading from Small Wonder

"Small Wonder" is the first essay in Kingsolver's book of the same name that she began writing in the wake of September 11, 2001. Small Wonder also includes the essay "Little Chickens," a reflection about her daughter Lily raising a chicken, collecting its eggs, and proudly feeding her family breakfast — a precursor to the themes of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.

Following is an extended version of the passage included in the program:

"Something new is upon us, and yet nothing is ever new. Two thousand years ago, the Greeks understood this enemy. It inhabited their imagination in a favorite tale of heroic adversity, the story of Jason and the Argonauts, where it took the shape of a particular dragon. When this creature was slain and its corpse fell to the soil, each of its teeth germinated and instantly grew into a new enemy, fully armed and born full-force to the battle. In all of his picturesque predicaments, Jason never faced one more impossible than this field of foes, each with its own mouthful of teeth aching to germinate. For once he couldn't fight his way out; it took a woman to save him. Medea, who loved Jason and tried to protect him, whispered in his ear a simple truth: Hatred dies only when turned on itself. This force could not be extinguished by the sword, she told him; only a clever psychological strategy could vanquish it. Jason took her advice but went about it in his own way, by throwing a rock cryptically and inciting an internal riot of rock throwing in which the dragon's-tooth warriors destroyed one another.

"Later on, Jason encountered another dragon. Unbelievably (but of course, heroes being only what they are, predictably), he again drew his sword, ready to kill it. Medea stopped him with a quick, gentle hand on his bicep. This time, rather than allowing a new field of hatred to be sown and reaped, she moved quietly to the mouth of the sleeping dragon and gave it an elixir of contentment so it would remain asleep as she and her lover passed by.

"At a time when the modern imagination seems fully engaged in discussion of swords of every length and breadth, there's little room for other kinds of talk. But I'm emboldened by Medea to speak up on behalf of psychological strategy. It's not a simple-minded suggestion; her elixir of contentment is exactly as symbolic as Jason's all conquering sword, and the latter has by no means translated well into reality. The strategic difference is the capacity to understand this one thing. Some forms of enemy are made more deadly by killing. It would require the deepest possible shift of our hearts to live in this world of fundamental animosity and devote ourselves not to the escalating exertion to kill, but rather, to lulling animosity to sleep. Modern humanity may not be up to the challenge. Modern humanity may not have a choice.

The miracle of Lorestan Province haunts me as I consider this predicament. I catch glimpses of that bear pacing restlessly, or the periphery of everything I thought I could be sure of. We are alive in a fearsome time, and we have been given new things to fear. We've been delivered huge blows but also huge opportunities to reinforce or reinvent our will, depending on where we look for honor and how we name our enemies. The easiest thing is to think of returning the blows. But there are other things we must think about as well, other dangers we face. A careless way of sauntering across the earth and breaking open its treasures, a terrible dependency on sucking out the world's best juices for ourselves—these may also be our enemies. The changes we dread most may contain our salvation. And the stinging truth that we aren't entirely loved for our ways in this world? Like the bear, this thing could eat us up or save us. We will see."

(37:47) Favorite Passage from The Poisonwood Bible

Krista recites part of this extended passage from Kingsolver's award-winning novel, The Poisonwood Bible:

God is everything, then. God is a virus. Believe that, when you get a cold. God is an ant. Believe that, too, for driver ants are possessed, collectively, of the size and influence of a Biblical plague. They pass through forest and valley in columns a hundred meters across and many miles long, eating their way across Africa. Animal and vegetable they take, mineral they leave behind. This is what we learned in Kilanga: move out of the way and praise God for the housecleaning. In a few days the dark brigade will have passed on through—those ants can't stop moving. You return to find your houses combed spotless of spoiled crumbs, your bedding free of lice, your woodlots cleansed of night soil, your hen coops rid of chicken mites. If by chance a baby was left behind in a crib, or a leopard in a cage, it would be a skeleton without marrow, clean as a whistle. But for those prepared to move aside for a larger passage, it works. Loss and salvation.

Africa has a thousand ways of cleansing itself. Driver ants, Ebola virus, acquired immune deficiency syndrome: all these are brooms devised by nature to sweep a small clearing very well. Not one of them can cross a river by itself. And none can survive past the death of its host. A parasite of humans that extinguished us altogether, you see, would quickly be laid to rest in human graves. So the race between predator and prey remains exquisitely neck and neck.

As a teenager reading African parasitology books in the medical library, I was boggled by the array of creatures equipped to take root upon a human body. I'm boggled still, but with a finer appreciation for the partnership. Back then I was still a bit appalled that God would set down his barefoot boy and girl dollies into an Eden where, presumably, He had just turned loose elephantiasis and microbes that eat the human cornea. Now I understand, God is not just rooting for the dollies. We and our vermin all blossomed together out of the same humid soil in the Great Rift Valley, and so far no one is really winning. Five million years is a long partnership. If you could for a moment rise up out of your own beloved skin and appraise ant, human, and virus as equally resourceful beings, you might admire the accord they have all struck in Africa.

Back in your skin, of course, you'll shriek for a cure. But remember: air travel, roads, cities, prostitution, the congregation of people for efficient commerce—these are gifts of godspeed to the virus. Gifts of the foreign magi, brought from afar. In the service of saving Africa's babies and extracting its mineral soul, the West has built a path to its own door and thrown it wide for the plague.

(41:05) Reading from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

In "Time Begins," the final chapter of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Kingsolver reflects on the trade-offs of her family's year of eating locally in terms of consumption, land, and cost:

Altered routines were really the heart of what we'd gained. We'd learned that many aisles of our supermarket offered us nothing local, so we didn't even push our carts down those: frozen foods, canned goods, soft drinks (yes, that's a whole aisle). Just grab the Virginia dairy products and organic flour and get out, was our motto, before you start coveting thy neighbor's goods. A person can completely forget about lemons and kiwis once the near occasion is removed.

As successful as our sleuthing into local markets had been, we never did find good local wheat products, or seafood. I was definitely looking forward to some nonlocal splurges in the coming months: wild-caught Alaskan salmon and bay scallops and portobellos, hooray. In moderation of course. I had a much better sense of my options now and could try for balance, buying one bottle of Virginia wine, for example, for every import.

The biggest shock of our year came when we added up the tab. We'd fed ourselves, organically and pretty splendidly we thought, on about fifty cents per family member, per meal—probably less than I spent in the years when I qualified for food stamps. Of course, I now had the luxury of land for growing food to supplant our purchases. But it wasn't a lot of land: 3,524 square feet of tilled beds gave us all our produce—that's a forty-by-twenty-two foot spread, per person. It felt a lot bigger when we were weeding it. We appreciate our farm's wooded mountainsides for hiking and the rare morel foray—and for our household water supply—but in the main, one doesn't eat a nature preserve. Adding up the land occupied by our fruit trees, berry bushes, and the pasture grazed by our poultry brings our land-use total for nutritional support to about a quarter acre—still a modest allotment. Our main off-farm purchases for the year were organic grain for animal feed, and the 300 pounds of flour required for our daily bread. To put this in perspective, a good wheat field yields 1,600 pounds of flour per acre. In total, for our grain and flour, pastured meats and goods from the farmers' market, and our own produce, our family's food footprint for the year was probably around one acre.

By contrast, current nutritional consumption in the U.S. requires an average of 1.2 cultivated acres for every citizen—4.8 acres for a family of four. (Among other things, it takes space to grow corn syrup for that hypothetical family's 219 gallons of soda.) These estimates become more meaningful when placed next to another prediction: in 2050, the amount of U.S., farmland available per citizen will be only 0.6 acres. By the numbers, the hypothetical family has change in the cards. By any measure, ours had discovered a way of eating that was more resourceful than I ever could have predicted.

In the coming year, I decided, I would plant fewer tomatoes, and more flowers. If we didn't have quite such a big garden, if we took a vacation to the beach this summer, we'd do that thanks to our friends at the farmers' market. The point of being dedicated locavores for some prescribed length of time, I now understand, is to internalize a trust in one's own foodshed. It's natural to get panicky right off the bat, freaking out about January and salad, thinking we could never ever do it. But we did. Without rationing, skipping a meal, buying a corn-fed Midwestern burger or breaking our vows of exclusivity with local produce, we lived inside our own territory for one good year of food life.