Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

by Barbara Kingsolver

  Within one field, an application of pesticides will immediately reduce insect populations but not eliminate them. Depending on the spray density and angle, wind, proximity to the edge of the field, and so forth, bugs get different doses of the poison. Those receiving a lethal dose are instant casualties.

  Which bugs stay around? Obviously, those lucky enough to duck and cover. Also a few of those who did get a full, normally lethal dosage, but who have a natural resistance to the chemicals. If their resistance is genetic, that resistance will come back stronger in the next generation. Over time, with continued spraying, the portion of the population with genetic resistance will increase. Eventually the whole population will resist the chemicals.

  This is a real-world example of evolution, and whether or not it's showing up in textbooks, it is going strong in our conventional agriculture. More than 500 species of insects and mites now resist our chemical controls, along with over 150 viruses and other plant pathogens. More than 270 of our recently developed herbicides have now become ineffective for controlling some weeds. Some 300 weed species resist all herbicides. Uh-oh, now what?

  The standard approach has been to pump up the dosage of chemicals. In 1965, U.S. farmers used 335 million pounds of pesticides. In 1989 they used 806 million pounds. Less than ten years after that, it was 985 million. That's three and a half pounds of chemicals for every person in the country, at a cost of $8 billion. Twenty percent of these approved-for-use pesticides are listed by the EPA as carcinogenic in humans.

  So, how are the bugs holding out? Just fine. In 1948, when pesticides were first introduced, farmers used roughly 50 million pounds of them and suffered about a 7 percent loss of all their field crops. By comparison, in 2000 they used nearly a billion pounds of pesticides. Crop losses? Thirteen percent.

  Biologists point out that conventional agriculture is engaged in an evolutionary arms race, and losing it. How can we salvage this conflict? Organic agriculture, which allows insect predator populations to retain a healthy presence in our fields, breaks the cycle.

  * * *

  STEVEN L. HOPP

  David and Elsie were raised by farmers and are doing the same for another generation. Throughout the afternoon their children, in-laws, and grandchildren flowed in and out of the yard and house, the adults consulting about shared work, the barefoot kids sharing a long game of cousins and summer. Now we stopped in to meet the son and daughter-in-law whose house stood just beyond David's cornfield. As we stayed into evening, conversation on the porch debated the most productive pasture-grass rotations for cattle; out in the yard it was mostly about whose turn it was for the tire swing.

  Many months later when I described this visit to a friend, he asked acerbically, "What, not even a mosquito to bother heaven?" (He also mentioned the name Andy Griffith.) Probably there were mosquitoes. I don't remember. I do know this family has borne losses and grief, just like the rest of us. But if they are generally content, must such a life inevitably be dismissed as mythical, or else merely quaint? Urban people may be allowed success, satisfaction, and consequence, all at once. Members of David and Elsie's extended family share work they love, and impressive productivity. They are by no means affluent, but seem comfortable with their material lot, and more importantly--for farmers--are not torn by debt or drained by long commutes to off-the-farm jobs. They work long hours, but value a life that allows them to sit down to a midday lunch with family, or stand outside the barn after the evening milking and watch swallows come in to roost.

  They belong to a surprisingly healthy community of similar small farms. Undoubtedly, some people in the neighborhood have their ludicrous grudges, their problem children, their disputed fencelines; they are human. But they are prospering modestly by growing food. At a vegetable auction in town, farmers sell their produce wholesale to restaurants and regional grocery chains. Nothing travels very far. The farmers fare well on the prices, and buyers are pleased with the variety and quality, starting with bedding plants in May, proceeding through all the vegetables, ending with October pumpkins and apples. The nearby food co-op sells locally made cheeses, affordably priced. The hardware store sells pressure canners and well-made tools, not mechanical singing fish.

  It sounds like a community type that went extinct a generation ago. But it didn't, not completely. If a self-sufficient farming community has survived here, it remains a possibility elsewhere. The success of this one seemed to hinge on many things, including steady work, material thrift, flexibility, modest expectations, and careful avoidance of debt--but not including miracles, as far as I could see. Unless, of course, we live in a country where those qualities have slipped from our paddock of everyday virtues, over to the side of "miracle." I couldn't say.

  It was dark by the time we headed back through the cornfield to Elsie and David's house. At low speeds our car runs solely on battery, so it's spookily quiet, as if the engine had died but you're still rolling along. We could hear night birds and the tires softly grinding dust as we turned into the field.

  "Stop here," David said suddenly. "Pull ahead just a little, so the headlights are pointing up into the field. Now turn off the headlights."

  The field sparkled with what must have been millions of fireflies--the most I've ever seen in one place. They'd probably brought their families from adjacent states into this atrazine-free zone. They blinked densely, randomly, an eyeful of frenzied stars.

  "Just try something," David said. "Flash the headlights one time, on and off."

  What happened next was surreal. After our bright flash the field went black, and then, like a wave, a million lights flashed back at us in unison.

  Whoa. To convince ourselves this was not a social hallucination, we did it again. And again. Hooting every time, so pleased were we with our antics. It's a grand state of affairs, to fool a million brainless creatures all at the same time. After five or six rounds the fireflies seemed to figure out that we were not their god, or they lost their faith, or at any rate went back to their own blinky business.

  David chuckled. "Country-kid fireworks."

  We sat in the dark until after midnight, out in the yard under the cherries, talking about the Farm Bill, our kids, religion, the future, books, writing. In his spare time (a concept I can hardly imagine for this man) David is a writer and editor of Farming Magazine, a small periodical on sustainable agriculture. We could have talked longer, but thought better of it. People might sometimes wish to sleep in, but cows never do.

  In the morning I woke up in the upstairs bedroom aware of a breeze coming through the tall windows, sunlight washing white walls, a horse clop-clopping by on the road outside. I had the sensation of waking in another country, far from loud things.

  Lily went out to the chicken coop to gather eggs, making herself right at home. We ate some for breakfast, along with the farm's astonishingly good oatmeal sweetened with strawberries and cream. This would be a twenty-dollar all-natural breakfast on the room service menu of some hotels. I pointed this out to David and Elsie--that many people think of such food as an upper-class privilege. David laughed. "We eat fancy food all right. Organic oatmeal, out of the same bin we feed our horses from!"

  We packed up to leave, reminding one another of articles we meant to exchange. We vowed to come again, and hoped they'd come our way too, though that is less likely, because they don't travel as much as we do. Nearly all their trips are limited by the stamina of the standardbred horses that draw their buggy. David and Elsie are Amish.

  Before I had Amish friends, I imagined unbending constraints or categorical aversions to such things as cars (hybrid or otherwise). Like many people, I needed firsthand acquaintance to educate me out of religious bigotry. The Amish don't oppose technology on principle, only particular technologies they feel would change their lives for the worse. I have sympathy for this position; a good many of us, in fact, might wish we'd come around to it before so much noise got into our homes. As it was explained to me, the relationship of the Amish with the
ir technology is to strive for what is "appropriate," making that designation case by case. When milking machines came up for discussion in David and Elsie's community, the dairy farmers pointed out that milking by hand involves repeatedly lifting eighty-pound milk cans, limiting the participation of smaller-framed women and children. Milking machines were voted in because they allow families to do this work together. For related reasons, most farmers in the community use tractors for occasional needs like pulling a large wagon or thresher (one tractor can thus handle the work on many farms). But for daily plowing and cultivating, most prefer the quiet and pace of a team of Percherons or Belgians.

  David summarizes his position on technology in one word: boundaries. "The workhorse places a limit on the size of our farms, and the standardbred horse-drawn buggy limits the distances we travel. This is basically what we need. This is what keeps our communities healthy." It makes perfect sense, of course, that limiting territory size can yield dividends in appreciation for what one already has, and the ability to manage it without debt. The surprise is to find whole communities gracefully accepting such boundaries, inside a nation that seems allergic to limitations, priding itself instead on the freedom to go as far as we want, as fast as we can, and buy until we run out of money--or longer, if we have credit cards.

  Farmers like Elsie and David are a link between the past and future. They've declined to participate in the modern century's paradigm of agriculture--and of family life, for that matter, as they place high value on nonmaterial things like intergenerational family bonds, natural aesthetics, and the pleasures of shared work. By restraining their consumption and retaining skills from earlier generations of farmers, they are succeeding. When the present paradigm of extractive farming has run its course, I don't foresee crowds of people signing up for the plain wardrobe. But I do foresee them needing guidance on sustainable agriculture.

  I realized this several years ago when David and Elsie came to our county to give an organic dairy workshop, at the request of dairy farmers here who were looking for new answers. It was a discouraged lot who attended the meeting, most of them nearly bankrupt, who'd spent their careers following modern dairy methods to the letter: growth hormones, antibiotics, mechanization. David is a deeply modest man, but the irony of the situation could not have been lost on him. There sat a group of hardworking farmers who'd watched their animals, land, and accounts slide into ruin during the half-century since the USDA declared as its official policy, "Get big or get out."

  And there sat their teacher, a farmer who'd stayed small. Small enough, anyway, he would never have to move through his cornfield too quickly to study the soil, or hear the birds answer daylight with their song.

  * * *

  Organically Yours

  BY CAMILLE

  The word organic brings to my mind all the health food stores I've roamed through over the years, which seem to have the same aroma no matter how many miles lie between them: sweet, earthy hints of protein powder, bulk cereal, fresh fruit, and hemp. I guess the word means different things to different people. When applied to food (not a college sophomore's most dreaded chemistry class), "organic" originally described a specific style of agriculture, but now it has come to imply a lifestyle, complete with magazines and brands of clothing. The word has sneaked onto a pretty loose-knit array of food labels too, tiptoeing from "100% organic" over to "contains organic ingredients." Like overused slang, the term has been muddled by rising popularity. It's true, for example, that cookies "made with organic cocoa" have no residue of chemical pesticides or additives in the chocolate powder, but that doesn't vouch for the flour, milk, eggs, and spices that are also in each cookie.

  Why should we care which ingredients, or how many, are organic? The reasons go beyond carcinogenic residues. Organic produce actually delivers more nutritional bang for the buck. These fruits and vegetables are tougher creatures than those labeled "conventional," precisely because they've had to fight off predators themselves. Plants live hard lives. They don't have to run around looking for food or building nests to raise their young, but they still have their worries. There's no hiding from predators when you have roots in the ground, and leaves that require direct contact with sunlight. You're stuck, right out in the open. Imagine the Lifetime Original movie: the helpless mother soy plant watching in agony, unable to speak or move, as a loathsome groundhog gobbles down her baby beans one at a time. Starting to tear up yet?

  Next plant-kingdom heartache: there is no personal space for the garden vegetable. If you're planted in a row of other tomatoes, there you'll stay for life, watching the neighbors get a nasty case of hornworms, knowing in your heart you're going to get them too. If nobody is spritzing chemicals on the predators, all a plant can do is to toughen up by manufacturing its own disease/pest-fighting compounds. That's why organic produce shows significantly higher levels of antioxidants than conventional--these nutritious compounds evolved in the plant not for our health, but for the plant's. Several studies, including research done by Allison Byrum of the American Chemical Society, have shown fruits and vegetables grown without pesticides and herbicides to contain 50 to 60 percent more antioxidants than their sprayed counterparts. The same antioxidants that fight diseases and pests in the plant leaf work similar magic in the human body, protecting us not so much against hornworms as against various diseases, cell aging, and tumor growth. Spending extra money on organic produce buys these extra nutrients, with added environmental benefits for the well-being of future generations (like mine!).

  Some of the best-tasting things in life are organic. This dessert (adapted from a Jamie Oliver creation, via our friend Linda) is a great way to use the high-summer abundance of blackberries, which in our part of the country are rain-washed and picked straight from wild fields. The melon salsa will bring one of summer's most luscious orange fruits from the breakfast table to a white tablecloth with candles. It's elegant and delicious over grilled salmon or chicken.

  BASIL-BLACKBERRY CRUMBLE

  2-3 apples, chopped

  2 pints blackberries

  2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar

  1 large handful of basil leaves, chopped

  1/4 cup honey--or more, depending on tartness of your berries

  Preheat oven to 400deg. Combine the above in an ovenproof casserole dish, mix, and set aside.

  5 tablespoons flour

  3 heaping tablespoons brown sugar

  1 stick cold butter

  Cut butter into flour and sugar, then rub with your fingers to make a chunky, crumbly mixture (not uniform). Sprinkle it over the top of the fruit, bake 30 minutes until golden and bubbly.

  MELON SALSA

  (Makes six generous servings.)

  1 medium cantaloupe

  1 red bell pepper 1 small jalapeno pepper

  1/2 medium red onion

  1/4 cup fresh mint leaves

  1-2 tablespoons honey

  2 teaspoons white vinegar

  Dice melons and peppers into 1/4-inch cubes. Finely mince onion and mint. Toss with honey and vinegar, allow to sit at least one hour before serving over grilled chicken breast or fish filet.

  Download these and all other Animal, Vegetable, Miracle recipes at www.AnimalVegetableMiracle.com

  * * *

  12 * ZUCCHINI LARCENY

  July

  The president succumbed to weeds. So did the lost dogs, the want ads, and our county's Miss America hopeful. By the time we returned from vacation at the end of June, our fastidious layers of newspaper mulch were melting into the topsoil. The formerly clean rows between our crops were now smudged everywhere with a hoary green five o'clock shadow. Weeds crowded the necks of the young eggplants and leaned onto the rows of beans. Weeds are job security for the gardener.

  Pigweeds, pokeweeds, quackgrass, crabgrass, purslane: we waged war, hoeing and yanking them up until weeds began to twine through our dreams. We steamed and ate some of the purslane. It's not bad. And, we reasoned (with logic typical of those who strateg
ize wars), identifying it as an edible noncombatant helped make it look like we might be winning. Weed is, after all, an arbitrary designation--a plant growing where you don't want it. But tasty or not, most of the purslane still had to come out. The agricultural concern with weeds is not aesthetic but functional. Weedy species specialize in disturbed (i.e. newly tilled) soil, and grow so fast they kill the crops if allowed to stay, first through root competition and then by shading.

  Conventional farming uses herbicidal chemicals for weed control, but since organic growers don't, it is weeds--even more than insects--that often present the most costly and troublesome challenge. In large operations where a mulching system like ours is impractical, organic farmers often employ three-or four-year crop rotations, using fast-growing cover crops like buckwheat or winter rye to crowd out weeds, then bare-tilling (allowing weeds to germinate, then tilling again to destroy seedlings) before planting the crops. The substitute for chemical-intensive farming is thoughtful management of ecosystems, and that is especially true when it comes to keeping ahead of the weeds. As our Uncle Aubrey says, "Weeds aren't good, but they are smart."

  It's not a proud thing to admit, but we were getting outsmarted by the pigweeds. We had gardened this same plot for years, but had surely never had this much of the quackgrass and all its friends. How did they get out of hand this year? Was it weather, fertility imbalance, inopportune tilling times, or the horse manure we'd applied? The heat of composting should destroy weed seeds, but doesn't always. I looked back through my garden journals for some clue. What I found was that virtually every entry, every late June and early July day for the last five years, included the word weeds: "Spent morning hoeing and pulling weeds.... Started up hand tiller and weeded corn rows.... Overcast afternoon, good weeding weather.... Tied up grape vines, weeded." And this hopeful entry: "Finished weeding!" (Oh, right.) It's commonly said that humans remember pleasure but forget pain, and that this is the only reason women ever have more than one child. I was thinking now: or more than one garden.