Barbara Kingsolver is a well-known author of fiction, poetry and creative non-fiction. She’s won many awards, including the National Humanities Medal. (For her books I’ve read, click on her name.) Steven Hopp (her husband) wrote fact-filled sidebars and Camille Kingsolver (her daughter) wrote food-filled chapter endings.

This book is the story of “how our family was changed by our first year of deliberately eating food produced from the same place where we worked, went to school, loved our neighbors, drank the water, and breathed the air.” Steven Hopp teaches environmental studies at Emory & Henry College and wrote well-documented sidebars of food facts. Camille Kingsolver attends Duke University and provided brief chapter endings of seasonal family history, focused on food and menus appropriate for each season. The book has a captivating drawing described as a “vegetannual” – it has six layers of plants, starting with four that ripen in May (in SW Virginia) and on up to one plant, the pumpkin, that ripens in October. Barbara says, “Picture a single imaginary plant, bearing throughout one season all the different vegetables we harvest.” They are not vegetarians – they raised chickens and turkeys on the farm in SW Virginia that Steven owned. It has a farmhouse, barn, orchards and fields. He was living there when she met him. She had “lived half her life in Arizona and raised two girls for the whole of theirs.” Ch 1 – Called Home – describes all that went into their decision to relocate on his farm and do the grand experiment of living locally – either on what they raised or what they could buy from neighbors directly or at the local farmers’ market.

Their grand experiment began with their decision to abandon “the industrial food pipeline” to live a rural life. This required a great commitment – to vow that, for one year, they’d only buy food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it. They would plant in season and harvest in season their plants (all on the imagined “vegetannual” plant) and their chickens or turkeys. The youngest daughter was in charge of the chickens and eggs, which she would sell at the farmers’ market. Barbara had to deal with the turkeys. But most of their efforts, which were abundant, were as a family. Their rural neighbors quickly befriended these newcomers not just to advise them but also to welcome the family to living the mainly local-food lifestyles that they had been living for many years.

The story is told chronologically in 20 chapters. Ch 2 – Waiting for Asparagus: Late March – then through spring, summer, fall and winter, finally reaching in Ch 19 – Hungry Month: February-March – the end of their grand adventure. (Of course, with frozen local meats and plants in their freezer, winter months rely on more than canning, which they also did in abundance.) Ch 20 – Time Begins – summarizes what their new rural lifestyle had taught them and how it had changed them to the better and forever. There are more than plants and poultry between Ch 2 and Ch 19. Especially interesting and unexpected by me is the story of making cheese at home, both soft cheeses (easy work) and hard cheeses (hard work). One omission in this book is the story of the reason why some people want to abandon the “industrial food pipeline.” However, book 243 (The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals) by Michael Pollan gives this in detail. He writes of more than many readers ever want to know about CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) – what tightly confined animals are fed (growth hormones and many antibiotics) and how their waste can be reused by other animals.

Before the end of their initial year, Barbara published “The Blessings of Dirty Work” in the Washington Post, September 30, 2007. This 6-pp article is reprinted at the end of this book. It is not a condensation of heir new rural lifestyle but also discuses lives of farmers in other countries. I feel that she made the right choice in using this as sort of an afterword rather than as a foreword, for she could not have written with personal experience an article on rural lifestyles as “dirty work” if she had tried to write about such one year earlier.

In this book Barbara Kingsolver wrote of their adventure as part memoir and part journalistic investigation. She makes reading about their learning how to live rurally on local foods a compelling and highly enjoyable read. This was also the opinion of my wife’s Book Club that led me to read it. I give this book my highest recommendation.