Can you imagine it? Dropping everything and moving to be closer to the Earth. Kingsolver describes quite a picture. It seems like the ultimate healthy lifestyle. Eat what you can produce and try to eliminate all else. Be true to the local farmers and stop abusing fossil fuels. Kingsolver even describes how she creates her own mayonnaise. She does everything from growing her own vegetables to making her own salad dressing. It seems very cool, like something I would want to do if it was at all possible. The more I think about it, some of the things Kingsolver does are not realistic to a college student’s lifestyle. I mean, do I really have the time to grow my own food? The lack of sunlight in the places I visit most often (my dorm, library, friend’s dorm) could pose a problem. Then there is the lack of funds part of the problem. As a broke college student, even if I wanted to live the lifestyle Kingsolver describes, I don’t think it is at all financially possible. Of course, raising my own chickens is out of the question, even though that would be very interesting. Can you picture it? A long line of chickens following me to class or running around the dorms. I think that the situation Kingsolver presents in Animal, Vegetable, Mineral is realistic when considered in the perspective of Kingsolver and her family, but when you consider my life at this point, there is no possible way for this to work. Kingsolver is a novelist and her husband, a professor. They were financially stable and it was a viable option for them to survive on just the locally grown food. Where am I supposed to get such things? I don’t have a car and travelling an hour on the bus to reach a farmers market does not seem like a great idea to me. Overall, I must conclude that the idea of good living that Kingsolver describes is not at all realistic for me, at least not at this time.
