“Set down a platter of country ham in front of a rabbi, an imam, and a Buddhist monk,” writes Barbara Kingsolver, “and you may have just conjured three visions of damnation. Guests with high blood pressure may add a fourth.” So why, then, is it socially acceptable to serve out-of-season raspberries from halfway across the world to a locavore, someone who eats only local produce? This very thing happened to Kingsolver at a fancy New York dinner party one winter’s evening. (When Kingsolver gently queried it, she was told, “This is New York, we can get anything we want, any day of the year.”) Why is it “ordinary for hosts to accommodate vegetarian guests, even if they’re carnivores themselves”, but would be thought weird to be “hospitable to diners who are queasy about fuel-guzzling foods”?

The question occurs to Kingsolver during a self-imposed year of eating local food. She and her family (two daughters and a bread-baking husband) move from arid Arizona to fertile Virginia and decide to eat only organic food raised in the neighbourhood. Much of it they grow themselves – such as the fifth of a ton of heirloom tomatoes that they slow-roast, dry, can and turn into jars of sauce, chutney and salsa ready for the lean winter. If they want mozzarella, they make it from gallons of milk (apparently, it takes less time than baking a fruit cobbler). Eggs come from hens tended by Kingsolver’s nine-year-old daughter. Turkeys are decapitated at the kitchen table. What they cannot raise or buy locally, they do without. So: no lemons, bananas or pineapples. They do, however, allow themselves small quantities of fair-trade coffee, spices and emergency boxes of macaroni cheese for visiting children (“I didn’t want anybody to perish on my watch”).

You may feel that we have been here before. The my-year-on-the-homestead memoir is fast becoming a cliché of modern food writing. You would be right, but we haven’t been here before with Kingsolver. What a companion she is: funny, feisty, poetic and with an engaging moral certainty, which somehow converts you despite yourself to her point of view. Just when you fear she is getting too schmaltzy, she hits you with a humdinger of common sense or humour, or truth, or all three. “Pushing a refrigerated green vegetable from one end of the earth to another is, let’s face it, a bizarre use of fuel.”

The simple fact is that Kingsolver can write, as readers of her novel The Poison-wood Bible will know, and this stops all the bucolic splendour from being insufferable. Her voice would make any subject compelling. All stories, she reminds us, begin in two ways: “A stranger came to town” or “I set out upon a journey”. This one is in the second category. Her family sets out on a journey “which surprised us many times”. The big surprise was how easy it was. “A person can completely forget about lemons and kiwis once the near occasion is removed.” Everyone told them that they would struggle to eat locally in January, and Kingsolver wishes she could offer “high drama, some chilling tales of a family gnawing on the leather uppers of their Birkenstocks”. Actually, it was fine. They ate pasta with pesto (prudently frozen back in August), bean soups, sautéed chard and grass-fed beef.

An obvious riposte to all of this is that it’s easy to play at being a smallholder when you are a bestselling novelist. To which Kingsolver could reply that her year as a locavore was actually cheaper than her previous lifestyle. Over the year, the family spent, on average, 50 cents (25p) per meal. Their produce netted them the equivalent of $7,500 added income. “We were saving tons of money by eating, in every sense, at home.”

Nor does the author want to leave us with feelings of hopelessness that almost all of us fall so far short of this self-sufficiency – that we buy our mozzarella in little balls from the supermarket instead of rolling up our sleeves and making it ourselves. The point, she argues, is to do something, rather than nothing, “searching out redemption where we can find it” and not to feel that our actions are trivial. “It’s the worst of bad manners – and self-protection, I think, in a nervously cynical society – to ridicule the small gesture.” Manners is the crucial word. Ultimately, what this book proposes is far more radical than just the planting of a few tomatoes. Kingsolver is demanding a full-scale revolution in manners. She would like to build a society where the mindless consumption of off-season fruits, factory-farmed meat and fizzy drinks is considered as crass as the serving of ham to a rabbi.

ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, MIRACLE: Our Year of Seasonal Eating by Barbara Kingsolver
Faber £16.00 pp352
Buy the book here at the offer price of £15.29 (inc p&p)

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