As promised, here are some thoughts sparked by "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle," with more to come tomorrow.


My mother-in-law is a home-schooling mom of six children who attends her local Reformed Conservative Baptist Church four times a week. My father-in-law is a truck driver who spends a good portion of his day listening to right-wing talk radio while he’s on the road. They are a kind family, a generous family, an extremely conservative family.

Barbara Kingsolver is a professional writer with a graduate degree in evolutionary biology. She believes that the theory of evolution makes “a fine creation story—a sort of quantifiable miracle.” She’s Number 73 on Fox News commentator Bernard Goldberg’s list of “100 People Who are Screwing Up America” because of her liberal political writings. Her husband is a fellow scientist, a university professor. Their family seems to be pretty solidly on the left side of the American political spectrum.

And yet, as I eagerly turned the pages of Kingsolver’s book "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: a year of food life," I couldn’t help but think how much Kingsolver and my mother-in-law would have in common. The thing that brings them together?

Food.

Good, old-fashioned, home-grown, home-preserved food.

My mother-in-law fell in love with gardening in her early 20s, and every year they grow a big garden. They’ve got all kinds of vegetables, plus apples, blueberries, raspberries and grapes. They currently keep chickens, and in the past they’ve raised dairy cows and pigs. They don’t live entirely off their own land, but they came pretty close to it back when my husband was a small boy growing up in the forests of rural Canada.

Kingsolver’s family moved across the country and embarked on their year of local eating partly because of their concern about the fossil fuels consumed when shipping food to their former home in Tucson, Arizona, as well as the drain on the limited water supply that gardening creates in the southwest. Their commitment to environmentalism would probably get them labeled “greenies” among a lot of people that I know.

You see, there’s a disturbing attitude common in conservative Christian circles to sneer at environmentalist or “green” efforts. I think of experiences like this or this, as well as my own past. I’m a logger’s daughter who grew up in a timber town during the spotted owl battles of the ’80s and ’90s. As a kid I had the vague idea that anything that smacked of environmentalism was probably directly responsible for forcing my friends’ fathers out of work. I tossed recyclable materials in the trash proudly. We weren’t environmentalists.

As an adult, I take a much more stewardship-oriented view of God’s creation and I see that Christianity and environmentally responsible living can go hand in hand. And what’s more: choices that some people might label “green” are to other people just “frugal.” My in-laws don’t grow a garden as a political statement. They just like to know where their food comes from. Plus, it’s fresher, better-tasting and more economical.

To be honest, that’s my main reason for buying local food as well. Some people claim that eating locally doesn’t even reduce greenhouse gases that much. But that doesn’t bother me. For me, the benefits of buying local food are for my family as much as for the earth. When I make time to go to the farmer’s market or the produce stand, we wind up eating more healthy, fresh food.

Plus, as the Kingsolver book points out, when you buy food at a farmer’s market, you might pay more, but more of that money is going right into the hands of the folks who grew it. When I buy an expensive heirloom tomato, I can put my dollar bills right into the hand of the farmer. No middle man, no grocery store, no trucking company taking a piece of that instead of the grower—just me using my little bit of purchasing power to support a local guy who is working hard to grow quality food.

Sometimes, it’s just about the food. In the words of my daughters: yummy, yummy food.