After finishing Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, I feel like I can identify at least one relationship between humans and nature. Based on the extreme skiing movie and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, I see nature as the closest thing humans can reach to beauty. As the book’s title suggests, nature is “a miracle.” In the extreme skiing movie, the mountain-men skied on uncharted mountains because the slopes were natural and hadn’t been groomed or explored by man yet. The skiers claimed they were closest to nature when they skied the natural slopes. In Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, the local, home-grown food was completely natural, and had not been processed or altered by humans yet. Additionally, in my eyes, when Kingsolver described watching plants and chickens grow over the year seemed like a natural miracle.
Overall, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle was a good book; I was definitely interested and intrigued the whole time. I’m someone who likes to read health magazines and food magazines, so the topic was interesting… but as I stated in my previous journals, the Kingsolver family’s experiment was a little too all-natural for me. I can appreciate wanting to become closer to nature and experience natural miracles. However, I feel like you can experience this only occasionally and still be happy. The older daughter, Camille, provided a good example. When she went away to college, she was forced to quit the local-food project, but she still attempted to eat locally when she could. Additionally, when the entire Kingsolver family slowly decreased the size of their garden, I believe they truly met the perfect balance. They were still able to experience the miracle of nature, but not become so absorbed in the miracle that they quit seeing it as a miracle. Had the skiers alternated between skiing on man-groomed slopes and natural slopes, they could have experienced the miracle of nature and spared their lives.
After reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, I can see myself perhaps growing my own tomatoes or shopping at a local market (like the one that’s in the Bank of America parking lot on Wednesdays). I appreciate the locally grown experiment enough to try it out. However, I don’t ever see myself completely devoting my entire life to the cause like the Kingsolver family did.
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