November 2008: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (Kingsolver)

Post date: Jan 07, 2010 10:41:14 PM

About 14 Smithies from classes '47 to '05 crowded into Nancy's living room on Thursday, November 20, 2008 with delicious pumpkin bread as well as Mimi's birthday cake! As with other harvest seasons, we read a book about food, but Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle was not as well-received as Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma which we read last year. Perhaps Kingsolver was preaching to the choir here, and her narrative of the year her family spent eating locally didn't capture our attention.

Many readers felt that the book got off to a very slow start, and repeated much of what we read in The Omnivore's Dilemma. Jennie felt that Kingsolver's emphasis on local, as opposed to organic, made the books complementary. Those who managed to stick with it did appreciate some of the more humorous sections of the book. (The turkey sex was especially interesting...) The conversation moved on to other food and farming related topics, including interesting anecdotes from Monica, Ruth and Janet about their jobs on local farms near Smith during WWII.

A discussion of Jennie's experience working on a farm in France led to a discussion of the Biodynamic Agriculture movement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodynamic_agriculture), about which a Smithie friend of Mimi's had done a documentary film, by chance.

A brief extract from the Wikipedia page describes it thus:

Biodynamic agriculture, a method of organic farming that has its basis in a spiritual world-view (anthroposophy, first propounded by Rudolf Steiner), treats farms as unified and individual organisms, emphasizing balancing the holistic development and interrelationship of the soil, plants, animals as a closed, self-nourishing system. Regarded by some proponents as the first modern ecological farming system, biodynamic farming includes organic agriculture's emphasis on manures and composts and exclusion of the use of artificial chemicals on soil and plants. Methods unique to the biodynamic approach include the use of fermented herbal and mineral preparations as compost additives and field sprays and the use of an astronomical sowing and planting calendar.

Because December is a busy time, we've chosen a shorter work of fiction (with sex, set in Italy...) for our next meeting.

~ Sherrill