Analysis Of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, By Barbara Kingsolver

It is hard to believe that we are in week eleven of this semester! For this week’s reading assignment we had the option to read a passage from President Harder and his wife, Karen, or a passage from Professor Barbara Kingsolver, whom I have never heard of until today. After reading the titles of each passage I came to the conclusion that I would find more interest in reading Kingsolver’s “from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” basically because the other title “Economics, Development, and Creation” just didn’t seem to suit me.
This summer I had the opportunity to travel with thirteen other Bluffton students to Arizona and Mexico. Although we spent fifteen weeks preparing for this trip, understanding the culture, and developing a sense of what was to come next, we still experienced a culture-shock when the plane wheels touched the ground. “One person’s picture postcard is someone else’s normal” (237) was more truth than I ever knew before going on this trip. We got to travel to Arizona, Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and even New Mexico—for about five minutes. Every

grocery shelf has traveled farther than most families go on their annual vacations,” (239) was a surprising fact. Often times I think families go farther out of their hometown for a family vacation. Some families go out of state, and others go out of the country. To think that our food travels this far is kind of unsettling. The food products go through a “transport, refrigeration, and processing” period before we actually see them. I used to think that we grew our food, cleaned it off, and threw it in the shopping cart right off the shelf at the grocery store. While reading through this passage all I could think about is my cross-cultural trip. A lot of the food brought into the section of Mexico we were working in was imported from other areas since the Mexican land was unable to produce crops and there weren’t any large manufacturing companies to make other