So are the many others Kingsolver has researched with admirable thoroughness, delivering them with a casual urgency that only occasionally veers into preachiness. This is a message Americans can’t hear often enough. Nevertheless, with the passing months, the rigors of sticking to the seasons sink in. So the hardship of Kingsolver’s planned abstinence isn’t that great.

Rules are bent for spices, and each family member gets a wild card at the outset: Kingsolver’s husband logically picks coffee (fair-trade and organic, it goes without saying), though the fresh fruit that her older daughter, Camille, craves is a bit too much (she has to settle for dried). Supermarkets become quick stops for dairy products and locally milled flour. Local farms have meat and eggs year-round. The farmers’ market supplies salad greens when it’s only starting to get warm. Kentucky farmers sell pasture-raised pork, lamb and turkey, and even “Kentucky caviar” from farmed fish. Her activism also started early, when she watched farmers founder as they tried to wean themselves from tobacco. Deeply frugal, she was raised in Kentucky among people who still remembered the hunger of the Depression, and she herself recalls qualifying for food stamps in the odd-jobs days before she hit the best-seller lists. She won the Betty Crocker Homemaker of Tomorrow Award in 1972 and studied biology in college and graduate school. Kingsolver, it emerges, is hardly unsuited to her new project, documented in “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle,” an engaging amalgam of memoir, environmental reporting and how-to book.

Hopp, a biologist who teaches environmental studies, had been raising fruit and vegetables at Hopp’s farm every summer since they met. Their intention was to spend a year of their new rural life eating only what they could grow themselves or buy from local suppliers. A few years ago, the novelist Barbara Kingsolver packed her husband and two daughters into a car and left their home in Tucson for good, resettling on a farm in southern Appalachia.

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