Barbara Kingsolver is the primary author of the book and also one of its four main characters. She is known for being a writer of fiction, as well as essays and poetry. Kingsolver received a Pulitzer Prize nomination, and she has won various other awards, including a National Humanities Medal. Her most well-known novel is The Poisonwood Bible.

Although she is not generally known for her nonfiction work, many of her novels include themes of social justice and environmental concerns, which are both important in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.

Throughout the book, Kingsolver reveals many facets of herself, such as her childhood in Kentucky as the daughter of farmers. As such, she has a deep respect for the farming process and has a desire to inform and educate, filling the knowledge gap that has developed as generations lost their intuitive understanding of food production. She also says that her education is in biology, giving her a depth of knowledge about natural processes, which inform the family’s experiment to “attempt to feed ourselves animals and vegetables whose provenance we really knew” (10)

She is often idealistic but also immensely practical in teaching her children how to appreciate growing their own food. She is also careful to explain the experiment from a scientific

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