Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

by Barbara Kingsolver

  Participating farmers bring vegetables here by the truckload, in special boxes that have never been used for conventional produce. Likewise, the packing facility's equipment is used for organic produce only. Most of the growers have just an acre or two of organic vegetables, among other crops grown conventionally. Those who stick with the program may expand their acreage of organic vegetables, but rarely to more than five, since they're extremely labor-intensive. After planting, weeding, and keeping the crop pest-free all season without chemicals, the final step of picking often begins before dawn. Some farmers have to travel an hour or more to the packing house. In high season they may make three or more trips a week. The largest grower of the group, with fifteen acres in production, last year delivered 200 boxes of peppers and 400 of tomatoes in a single day. Twenty-three crops are now sold under the Appalachian Harvest label, including melons, cucumbers, eggplants, squash, peas, lettuces, and many varieties of tomatoes and peppers.

  The packing house manager labels each box as it arrives so the grower's identity will follow the vegetables through washing, grading, and packaging, all the way to their point of wholesale purchase. Farmers are paid after the supermarket issues its check; Appalachian Harvest takes a 25 percent commission, revenue that helps pay for organic training, packing expenses, and organic certification. Cooperating farmers can sell their produce under the umbrella of a group certification, saving them hundreds of dollars in fees and complex bookkeeping, but they still would need individual certification to sell anywhere other than through the Appalachian Harvest label (e.g., a farmers' market). The project's sales have increased dramatically, gaining a few more committed growers each year, even though farmers are notoriously cautious. Many are still on the fence at this point, watching their neighbors to see whether this enormous commitment to new methods will be salvation or disaster. The term "high-value crop" is relative to a dirt-cheap commodity grain like corn; in season, even high quality organic tomatoes will bring the farmer only about 50 to 75 cents per pound. (The lower end, for conventional, is 18 cents.) But that can translate into a cautious living. Participants find the project compelling for many reasons. After learning to grow vegetables organically, many families have been motivated to make their entire farms organic, including hay fields.

  The Appalachian Harvest collective pays a full-time marketer named Robin who spends much of her life on the phone, in her vehicle, or pounding the grocery-store pavements, arranging every sale with the supermarkets, one vegetable and one week at a time. As a farmer herself, she knows the stakes. Also on the payroll here are the manager and summer workers who transform truckloads of field-picked vegetables into the clam-shelled or cellophane-wrapped items that ultimately reach the supermarket after produce has been washed and sorted for size and ripeness.

  On a midsummer day in the packing house, vegetables roll through the processing line in a quantity that makes the work in my own kitchen look small indeed. Tomatoes bounce down a sorting conveyor, several bushels per minute, dropping through different-sized holes in a vibrating belt. Workers on both sides of the line collect them, check for flaws and ripeness, and package the tomatoes as quickly as their hands can move, finally pressing on the "certified organic" sticker. Watching the operation, I kept thinking of people I know who can hardly even stand to hear that word, because of how organic is personified for them. "I'm always afraid I'm going to get the Mr. Natural lecture," one friend confessed to me. "You know, from the slow-moving person with ugly hair, doing back-and-leg stretches while they talk to you..." I laughed because, earnest though I am about food, I know this guy too: dreadlocked, Birkenstocked, standing at the checkout with his bottle of Intestinal-Joy Brand wheatgrass juice, edging closer to peer in my cart, reeking faintly of garlic and a keenness to save me from some food-karma error.

  For the record, this is what Appalachian Harvest organics look like at the source: Red Wing work boots, barbershop haircuts, Levi's with a little mud on the cuffs, men and women who probably go to church on Sunday but keep their religion to themselves as they bring a day's work to this packing house inside a former tobacco barn. If sanctimony is an additive in their product, it gets added elsewhere.

  The tomato room offered a 56-degree respite from the July swelter, but it was all business in there too: full boxes piled on pallets, in columns nearly reaching the ceiling. The stacks on one end of the room were waiting to be processed, while at the other they waited to be trucked out to nearby groceries. Just enough space remained in the center for workers to maneuver, carting out pallets for grading, sorting, and then slapping one of those tedious stickers on every one of the thousands of individual tomatoes that pass through here each day--along with every pepper, cabbage, cucumber, and melon. That's how the cashier ultimately knows which produce is organic.

  Supermarkets only accept properly packaged, coded, and labeled produce that conforms to certain standards of color, size, and shape. Melons can have no stem attached, cucumbers must be no less than six inches long, no more than eight. Crooked eggplants need not apply. Every crop yields a significant proportion of perfectly edible but small or oddly shaped vegetables that are "trash" by market standards.

  It takes as much work to grow a crooked vegetable as a straight one, and the nutritional properties are identical. Workers at the packing house were as distressed as the farmers to see boxes of these rejects piling up into mountains of wasted food. Poverty and hunger are not abstractions in our part of the world; throwing away good food makes no sense. With the help of several church and social justice groups, Appalachian Harvest arranged to deliver "factory second" vegetables all summer to low-income families. Fresh organic produce entered some of their diets for the first time.

  I grew up among farmers. In my school system we were all born to our rank, as inescapably as Hindus, the castes being only two: "farm" and "town." Though my father worked in town, we did not live there, and so by the numinous but unyielding rules of high school, I was "farmer." It might seem astonishing that a rural-urban distinction like this could be made in a county that boasted, in its entirety, exactly two stoplights, one hardware store, no beer joints (the county was dry), and fewer residents than an average Caribbean cruise ship. After I went away to school, I remained in more or less constant marvel over the fact that my so-called small liberal arts college, with an enrollment of about 2,000, was 25 percent larger than my hometown.

  And yet, even in a community as rural as that, we still had our self-identified bourgeoisie, categorically distinguished from our rustics. We of the latter tribe could be identified by our shoes (sometimes muddy, if we had to cover rough country to get to the school bus), our clothes (less frequently updated), or just the bare fact of a Rural Free Delivery mailing address. I spent my childhood in awe of the storybook addresses of some of my classmates, like "14 Locust Street." In retrospect I'm unsure of how fact-based the distinction really was: most of us "farm" kids were well-scrubbed and occasionally even stylish. Nevertheless, the line of apartheid was unimpeachably drawn. Little socializing across this line was allowed except during special events forced on us by adults, such as the French Club Dinner, and mixed-caste dating was unthinkable except to the tragic romantics.

  Sustaining the Unsustainable

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  Doesn't the Federal Farm Bill help out all these poor farmers?

  No. It used to, but ever since its inception just after the Depression, the Federal Farm Bill has slowly been altered by agribusiness lobbyists. It is now largely corporate welfare. The formula for subsidies is based on crop type and volume: from 1995 to 2003, three-quarters of all disbursements went to the top-grossing 10 percent of growers. In 1999, over 70 percent of subsidies went for just two commodity crops: corn and soybeans. These supports promote industrial-scale production, not small diversified farms, and in fact create an environment of competition in which subsidized commodity producers get help crowding the little guys out of business. It is this, rather than any improved efficiency or productiv
eness, that has allowed corporations to take over farming in the United States, leaving fewer than a third of our farms still run by families.

  But those family-owned farms are the ones more likely to use sustainable techniques, protect the surrounding environment, maintain green spaces, use crop rotations and management for pest and weed controls, and apply fewer chemicals. In other words, they're doing exactly what 80 percent of U.S. consumers say we would prefer to support, while our tax dollars do the opposite.

  Because of significant protest about this lack of support, Congress included a tiny allotment for local foods in the most recent (2002) Farm Bill: some support for farmers' markets, community food projects, and local foods in schools. But the total of all these programs combined is less than one-half of one percent of the Farm Bill budget, and none of it is for food itself, only the advertising and administration of these programs. Consumers who care about food, health, and the supply of cheap calories drowning our school lunch programs, for example, might want to let their representatives know we're looking for a dramatically restructured Farm Bill. Until then, support for local and sustainable agriculture will have to come directly from motivated customers.

  For more information visit www.farmaid.org.

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  STEVEN L. HOPP

  Why should this have been? How did the leafy, sidewalked blocks behind the newspaper office confer on their residents a different sense of self than did the homes couched among cow pastures and tobacco fields? The townie shine would have dimmed quickly (I now realize) if the merchants' confident offspring were catapulted suddenly into Philadelphia or Louisville. "Urban" is relative. But the bottom line is that it matters. The antipathy in our culture between the urban and nonurban is so durable, it has its own vocabulary: (A) city slicker, tenderfoot; (B) hick, redneck, hayseed, bumpkin, rube, yokel, clodhopper, hoecake, hillbilly, Dogpatch, Daisy Mae, farmer's daughter, from the provinces, something out of Deliverance. Maybe you see where I'm going with this. The list is lopsided. I don't think there's much doubt, on either side, as to which class is winning the culture wars.

  Most rural people of my acquaintance would not gladly give up their status. Like other minorities, we've managed to turn several of the aforementioned slurs into celebrated cultural identifiers (for use by insiders only). In my own life I've had ample opportunity to reinvent myself as a city person--to pass, as it were--but I've remained tacitly rural-identified in my psyche, even while living in some of the world's major cities. It's probably this dual citizenship that has sensitized me to my nation's urbanrural antipathy, and how it affects people in both camps. Rural concerns are less covered by the mainstream media, and often considered intrinsically comic. Corruption in city governments is reported as grim news everywhere; from small towns (or Tennessee) it is fodder for talk-show jokes. Thomas Hardy wrote about the sort of people who milked cows, but writers who do so in the modern era will be dismissed as marginal. The policy of our nation is made in cities, controlled largely by urban voters who aren't well informed about the changes on the face of our land, and the men and women who work it.

  Those changes can be mapped on worry lines: as the years have gone by, as farms have gone out of business, America has given an ever-smaller cut of each food dollar (now less than 19 percent) to its farmers. The psychic divide between rural and urban people is surely a part of the problem. "Eaters must understand," Wendell Berry writes, "that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act, and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used." Eaters must, he claims, but it sure looks like most eaters don't. If they did, how would we frame the sentence suggested by today's food-buying habits, directed toward today's farmers? "Let them eat dirt" is hardly overstating it. The urban U.S. middle class appears more specifically concerned about exploited Asian factory workers.

  Symptomatic of this rural-urban identity crisis is our eager embrace of a recently imposed divide: the Red States and the Blue States. That color map comes to us with the suggestion that both coasts are populated by educated civil libertarians, while the vast middle and south are crisscrossed with the studded tracks of ATVs leaving a trail of flying beer cans and rebel yells. Okay, I'm exaggerating a little. But I certainly sense a bit of that when urban friends ask me how I can stand living here, "so far from everything?" (When I hear this question over the phone, I'm usually looking out the window at a forest, a running creek, and a vegetable garden, thinking: Define everything.) Otherwise sensitive coastal-dwelling folk may refer to the whole chunk of our continent lying between the Cascades and the Hudson River as "the Interior." I gather this is now a common designation. It's hard for me to see the usefulness of lumping Minneapolis, Atlanta, my little hometown in Kentucky, Yellowstone Park, and so forth, into a single category that does not include New York and California. "Going into the Interior" sounds like an endeavor that might require machetes to hack through the tangled vines.

  In fact, the politics of rural regions are no more predictable than those in cities. "Conservative" is a reasonable position for a farmer who can lose home and livelihood all in one year by taking a risk on a new crop. But that's conservative as in, "eager to conserve what we have, reluctant to change the rules overnight," and unrelated to how the term is currently (often incomprehensibly) applied in party politics. The farm county where I grew up had so few Republicans, they all registered Democrat so they could vote in the only local primary. My earliest understanding of radical, class-conscious politics came from miners' strikes in one of the most rural parts of my state, and of our nation.

  The only useful generalization I'd hazard about rural politics is that they tend to break on the line of "insider" vs. "outsider." When my country neighbors sit down with a new social group, the first question they ask one another is not "What do you do?" but rather, "Who are your people?" Commonly we will spend more than the first ten minutes of a new acquaintance tracing how our families might be related. If not by blood, then by marriage. Failing that, by identifying someone significant we have known in common. Only after this ritual of familial placing does the conversation comfortably move on to other subjects. I am blessed with an ancestor who was the physician in this county from about 1910 into the 1940s. From older people I'll often hear of some memorably dire birth or farm accident to which my great-uncle was called; lucky for me he was skilled and Hippocratic. But even a criminal ancestor will get you insider status, among the forgiving. Not so lucky are those who move here with no identifiable family ties. Such a dark horse is likely to remain "the new fellow" for the rest of his natural life, even if he arrived in his prime and lives to be a hundred.

  The country tradition of mistrusting outsiders may be unfairly applied, but it's not hard to understand. For much of U.S. history, rural regions have been treated essentially as colonial property of the cities. The carpetbaggers of the reconstruction era were not the first or the last opportunists to capitalize on an extractive economy. When urban-headquartered companies come to the country with a big plan--whether their game is coal, timber, or industrial agriculture--the plan is to take out the good stuff, ship it to the population centers, make a fortune, and leave behind a mess.

  Given this history, one might expect the so-called Red States to vote consistently for candidates supporting working-class values. In fact, our nation in almost every region is divided in a near dead heat between two parties that apparently don't distinguish themselves clearly along class lines. If every state were visually represented with the exact blend of red and blue it earned in recent elections, we'd have ourselves a big purple country. The tidy divide is a media just-so story.

  Our uneasy relationship between heartland and coasts, farm and factory, country and town, is certainly real. But it is both more rudimentary and more subtle than most political analysts make it out to be. It's about loyalties, perceived communities, and the things each side understands to be important because of the ground, literally, upon which
we stand. Wendell Berry summed it up much better than "blue and red" in one line of dialogue from his novel Jayber Crow, which is peopled by farmers struggling to survive on what the modern, mostly urban market will pay for food. After watching nearly all the farms in the county go bankrupt, one of these men comments: "I've wished sometimes that the sons of bitches would starve. And now I'm getting afraid they actually will."

  In high summer, about the time I was seeing red in my kitchen, the same thing was happening to some of our county's tomato farmers. They had learned organic methods, put away the chemicals, and done everything right to grow a product consumers claimed to want. They'd waited the three years for certification. They'd watered, weeded, and picked, they'd sorted the round from the misshapen, producing the perfect organic tomatoes ordered by grocery chains. And then suddenly, when the farmers were finally bringing in these tomatoes by the truckload and hoping for a decent payout, some grocery buyers backtracked. "Not this week," one store offered without warning, and then another. Not the next week either, nor the next. A tomato is not a thing that can be put on hold. Mountains of ripe fruits piled up behind the packing house and turned to orange sludge, swarming with clouds of fruit flies.

  These tomatoes were perfect, and buyers were hungry. Agreements had been made. But pallets of organic tomatoes from California had begun coming in just a few dollars cheaper. It's hard to believe, given the amount of truck fuel involved, but transportation is tax-deductible for the corporations, so we taxpayers paid for that shipping. The California growers only needed the economics of scale on their side, a cheap army of pickers, and customers who would reliably opt for the lower price.