Best-selling novelist Barbara Kingsolver had always enjoyed growing vegetables. So when she and her family moved to a farm they decided to become 'locavores', eating only food that they or people they knew had produced. Have they struggled to survive? Not a bit of it, she tells Louise East
Earlier this summer Barbara Kingsolver spent six weeks touring the US to promote her new book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Every evening in a new city, a 1,000-strong audience would turn up to hear her speak. That's a whole lot of people - but then Kingsolver's 1998 book, The Poisonwood Bible, sold more than two million copies and was recently voted the best novel for reading groups. But instead of reading fiction Kingsolver talked about the subject of her new book: the year she and her family spent eating nothing but food that they or people they knew had produced. They became, in US parlance, locavores, cutting out carbon emissions, big business and dodgy food practices by eating only local food.
As the author of five novels, the 52-year-old is an old hand at readings, and she expected that, come the Q&A, the first question would be: "Miss Kingsolver, can you tell us where you got the inspiration for The Poisonwood Bible?" But that was not how it happened.
"One hundred per cent of the questions were about the new book. People wanted to talk about what's going on in their neighbourhood. Where can I buy local? What about organics? We had to cut off the questions after 40 minutes or so, and people just went out the door and kept talking."
Kingsolver is amazed to find herself and her book quite so trendy. When she dreamed up the idea of moving to a farm in West Virginia from the family's 20-year home in Arizona, she envisioned the project as important but distinctly niche, a book her publishers might put out to keep her happy. After all, the US is hardly known for its interest in food culture. As Kingsolver wryly puts it: "At a wild guess, it wouldn't surprise me if half of the population of the US has not really thought about where sweetcorn might come from in December."
With much of the country given over to vast tracts of agribusiness - GM corn, soya, wheat - the average food item in the US travels almost 2,500km (1,500 miles) from source to plate. If that sounds horrendous, then think about the green beans from Kenya and apples from New Zealand in Irish supermarkets. Every calorie in, say, a baby carrot flown in from South Africa gobbles up 66 calories of fuel. "Food issues are really preoccupying people," Kingsolver says. "They're worried not just about getting their food from who knows where and the fuel costs but also the sense that their money is flying away while the farms in their neighbourhood are collapsing."
The solution that Kingsolver and her family - husband Steven Hopp and daughters Camille and Lily - came up with was an attempt to reverse the flow. "It was kind of a lark at first. We'd always grown huge vegetable gardens; it was the main thing we did for exercise and fun, and, of course, the food is good. When we moved back to Virginia we just thought, well, why not try to grow everything? It seemed to us an interesting challenge more than a heroic quest."
Cue endless planting of tomatoes and courgettes with names such as 'Green Zebra' and 'Silvery Fir Tree'; the delivery of 15 baby turkeys (sternly refused names until one starts trying to mate with Hopp, when she is dubbed Lolita); and an entire month spent bottling a high-season glut of nearly 250kg of tomatoes. At the end of the year the family had lost no weight, eaten well and pretty much stuck to their plan.
Perhaps most tellingly of all, when the day came for their "fast" to end, they were not, Kingsolver writes, "gnawing our last frozen brick of sliced squash, watching the clock tick down the seconds till we could run out and buy Moon Pies". Instead the day came and went without their noticing it, and, two years on, they continue to produce most of their own food.
The book is full of statistics to make your hair curl. Ninety-eight per cent of the world's seed sales are controlled by just six companies. In Peru, the home of potatoes, farmers once grew 4,000 varieties; only a few dozen survive. Ninety nine per cent of US turkeys have been genetically rearranged so they are unable to reproduce.
But reading the joyful evocations of making mozzarella and bottling green beans can also bring on a slightly surly fit of the guilts. It's all very well for a best-selling author with green fingers, but what about the average city dweller, hard pressed for time and with no more than a north-facing window box? And what about the expense?
Kingsolver, who, along with Hopp, continued to work during the year, knows only too well that many of her readers will be time-poor urbanites, and she makes it clear that this is not a how-to book. "I wanted to send a kind of Valentine to urban readers. It's not just for people who live in the country and grow their own food. On the contrary, it's at least as important to me to sing this beautiful poetic song of food to people who may have lost touch with the beauty of food as a process and not just as a product."
In fact, she says city dwellers often have easier access to local produce than do people who live in areas of large-scale single-crop farming, due to the ever-increasing number of farmers' markets. "The first thing people can do is think about it. Even in a supermarket you can compare two bags of apples, one from Ireland and the other from New Zealand, and do some quick mental calculations about the fossil fuel involved."
At the end of their year of eating locally, Kingsolver calculated that, once the investment in chickens, seed and raw produce was taken into consideration, each meal had cost the family no more than 50c a head. "Eating well, eating organically, has a reputation for being a kind of middle-class privilege, which is really a myth."
In Ireland it's a myth that holds sway. As Michael Viney highlighted in this newspaper at the start of the year, Ireland's government- appointed Agri Vision 2015 committee found many farmers reluctant to pursue organics. As their report concludes: "For as long as price is the principal determinant of choice for the vast majority of consumers, organic production will not offer a feasible, competitive solution for the majority of Irish farmers." Yet with fossil fuels approaching depletion point, local food economies may become the only show in town.
"Returning gradually to local thriving food economies seems a much saner project than waiting for the centralised ones to collapse and then scurrying around looking for what we might eat after all of our local farms have disappeared.
"By the time my kids are my age, they will have to be eating differently," Kingsolver points out. "They'll probably look back at this relatively brief period of history in which we were eating from every corner of the planet, like orange juice was our birthright, and it will probably seem so degenerate to them." She laughs, appalled. "It'll be like how we look at the last days of the Roman empire: people lying around and gorging themselves and not thinking about the consequences."
Detailing their year in book form was "a guarantee that we'd actually do it or die trying". Hopp, who teaches environmental studies, has contributed fact-studded panels, and there are regular entries from eldest daughter Camille, but the book's backbone is Kingsolver, who draws the seasonal turn of a garden with a novelist's eye.
Far from being a recent convert to social activism, Kingsolver (who has an master's degree in ecology and evolutionary biology) has always been fond of sneakily goading her readers towards action. In novels such as The Bean Trees, Animal Dreams and The Poisonwood Bible, Kingsolver twines social issues - the loss of water rights, chemical pollution, the great colonial experiment - into her satisfying tales of love and family. "Telling a story is perhaps the most natural way for humans to exchange information. It's a way that you can engage a reader and bring them information that they might not otherwise think they wanted to know."
Yet even she was surprised by the massive success of The Poisonwood Bible. "Who knew? I mean, if I'd written a nonfiction book about postcolonial Africa, all 75 people who knew they were interested in that subject would have read it and that would be that. A novel allows you to reach more people, as long as you do it well. I have to keep you turning the pages or else you'll just put it down and say, oh, this is a book about the Congo - who needs that?"
With the end of her book tour in sight, Kingsolver is looking forward to returning to Virginia, where a previously untried crop of fennel awaits. The response to Animal, Vegetable, Miracle in both Europe and the US has been much more than flattering; it has been reassuring. "I'm so gratified, not for me but for the world, that so many people are interested in engaging."
The only part that makes her uncomfortable is that, after a year in which she ate incredibly well, spent time with her family and had fun, she is often portrayed as some kind of slow-food saint. "It wasn't about deprivation, and we didn't want to be heroes. That doesn't really engage anybody. When I read a book about climbing Mount Everest, all the frostbite and lost limbs, it does not make me want to do it. It makes me want to say, well, you fool, I'm glad you did it, not me."
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver is published by Faber and Faber, £16.99 in UK