Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

by Barbara Kingsolver

  Lily apparently knew all along that her workforce could actualize its potential. She had also been working her customer base for months, taking phone numbers in advance. A CEO wears many hats--accountant, supervisor, egg scrubber--but this company's special strength was public relations. Advance planning had taken into account not just winter production, but also egg color. The products from her different breeds of hens crossed a palette from soft green to pink, tan, and chocolate brown. Lily arranged them so every carton contained a rainbow, and printed out her own label, "Lily's Lovely Layers," with a photo of herself holding one of the lovelies. She pasted this over the Brand X names on the recycled cartons friends had saved for her. By the time she made her first sale, customers were practically lined up in the driveway.

  Lily was beside herself, dancing around the kitchen with her first dollars. Seeing my young entrepreneur realize her dream made me feel proud too, and also mystified, in the way of all parents who watch their kids acquire skills beyond our ken. When I was that age, the prospect of selling even a Girl Scout cookie mortified me to tears. Now I watched my nine-year-old stand a couple of inches taller each time she picked up the phone to arrange an egg pickup, always remembering first to ask, "How are you today, and how's your family?" In the evenings she sat down at the kitchen table with the account book I'd helped her set up to keep track of customer information, inventory, and expenses. Finally she was entering numbers in the "Income" column.

  I soon wondered if I'd have to walk down the driveway and get in line myself. I reminded Lily that our family still needed eggs too. We'd stayed well supplied for the past year from her three old pet hens, which I had presumed were not going to go on payroll. But now their eggs went straight into the Lovely Layer cartons with all the rest. They could be mine, I learned, for $2.50 a dozen. Taking into account the cost of feed, this price gave Lily a small profit margin and still pleased her customers.

  I, however, balked at it. Of course I didn't mind rewarding my hardworking daughter, that wasn't the problem. She had been diligent about caring for her hens, closing them safely into their coop every night, even cracking ice off their water bowl on cold mornings. She kept her ears permanently tuned to the chicken voices outside, so knew immediately when a coyote had crept into the yard, and barreled screaming for the front door before the rest of us had a clue. (I don't know about the coyote, but I nearly needed CPR.) These hens owed their lives and eggs to Lily, there was no question.

  But since she was taking her business so seriously, I wanted her to understand it genuinely. Businesses have start-up costs. I reminded her that I'd paid for the chicks, and also the feed they'd eaten for six months before they started laying--grazing hens still need supplementary protein, calcium, and other nutrients. I explained to Lily about capitalization, credit, and investors. She listened with interest. "I'll pay you back," she said immediately. "I want the business to be really mine, not just some little kid thing."

  She sat down with her ledger to figure the size of the zero-interest loan I'd fronted in venture capital. We had the receipts. We have to buy organic feed in bulk, so we'd already purchased all she'd need until next spring. What she had to calculate was the cost of thirty-two mail-order chicks and the edible wages required to keep the layers producing one full year. (Roosters had been dispatched.) I wondered myself what the figure would be. She bent over her ledger for a long time, pigtail ends brushing the table as her pencil scratched, erased, and scratched some more. Finally she spoke: "Two hundred and eighty-five dollars!"

  She rolled out of her chair, flopping dramatically onto the floor, eyes squeezed shut and tongue thrust out to convey either despair or grave fiscal alarm. As I said, a CEO wears many hats.

  "Don't panic," I said, sitting down beside her on the floor. "Let's talk about this."

  She opened one eye. "Mom, I won't make that much till I'm fifty or something."

  "Trust me, you will. It's not as much as it sounds. Plus, if we're keeping track of everything, I owe you for the roosters we ate and all the eggs we've used since April. I forgot about that. Add those up and we'll see where we are."

  Where we were, at the beginning of November, was just under $155 in debt. Lily and I made a deal. She would give me all the eggs I wanted, subtracting $2.50 per carton from her debt. I wouldn't charge interest, but I would ask to be considered a priority customer. No standing in line. At two cartons a week, she'd be debt-free in about thirty weeks. To a fourth-grader that sounds roughly the same as life without parole.

  "But you'll still be earning real money from all your other customers," I pointed out. "You'll be opening a bank account before you know it. And everybody's going to need extra eggs for our baking, with the holidays coming up."

  Cheered by the prospect of holiday baking, the Corporate Executive Officer took the situation in hand. As far as I know, the workforce was never apprised of the crisis.

  Of all holidays we celebrate in the United States, few come with food traditions that are really our own. Most of the holy days and bank holidays on our calendar have come from other cultures, some of them ancient, others too modern to have settled yet into having their own menus. The only red-blooded American holiday food customs, it seems to me, arrive on the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving.

  They couldn't be more different. The first is all about charring things on a grill, burgers and hot dogs and the like, washed down with plenty of beer or soda, the purpose being to stay outdoors for a long afternoon culminating at dusk in elaborate explosions of gunpowder. Aside from the flagpole that may be somewhere in the scene, there is nothing about this picnic that's really rooted in our land. The pyrotechnics are Chinese, technically, and the rest of the deal is as packaged as food can be. That might even be what's most American about it. At the end of a Fourth of July party, if asked to name the sources of what we'd consumed, we'd be hard pressed to muster an ingredient list.

  The other holiday is all about what North America has to offer at the end of a good growing season. Thanksgiving is my favorite, and always has been, I suppose because as a child of the farmlands I appreciate how it honestly belongs to us. On Saint Patrick's Day every beer-drinking soul and his brother is suddenly Irish. Christmas music fills our ears with tales of a Palestinian miracle birth, a generous Turkish saint whom the Dutch dressed in a red suit, and a Druid ceremonial tree...I think. But Turkey Day belongs to my people. Turkeys have walked wild on this continent since the last ice age, whereas Old Europe was quite turkeyless. (That fact alone scored them nearly enough votes to become our national bird, but in the end, I guess, looks do matter.) Corn pudding may be the oldest New World comfort food; pumpkins and cranberries, too, are exclusively ours. It's all American, the right stuff at the right time.

  To this tasty native assembly add a cohort of female relatives sharing work and gossip in the kitchen, kids flopped on the living room floor watching behemoth cartoon characters float down a New York thoroughfare on TV, and men out in the yard pretending they still have the upper-body strength for lateral passes, and that is a perfect American day. If we need a better excuse to focus a whole day on preparing one meal, eating it, then groaning about it with smiles on our faces, just add a dash of humility and hallelujah. Praise the harvest. We made it through one more turn of the seasons.

  In modern times it's mostly pageantry, of course, this rejoicing over harvest and having made it to winter's doorstep with enough food. But at our house this year, the harvest was real and the relief literal. Also, for the first time since we'd begun our local-food experiment, we approached a big dining event for which the script was already written. Local turkey? We had some whose lives began in the palms of our hands and ended twelve steps from the back door. Pumpkin pies, mashed potatoes, corn pudding, sweet potatoes, green beans, celery and chestnuts for the stuffing--how could it be this easy? On our continent, this party plans itself.

  I had no complaint about celebrating Thanksgiving twice, this time carnivorously. Any excuse to spend a day with
friends and my husband and kids is good with me, and I'm partial to the traditional menu. I love carving up Tom on the table, and then revisiting him throughout the following weeks in sandwiches, soups, and casseroles. I have such a fondness for the stuffing, my post-Thanksgiving bliss in childhood was to make stuffing sandwiches. (Dr. Atkins, roll over.) Our recipe starts with a skillet full of sauteed onions, garlic, home-grown celery, and chestnuts from our Chinese chestnut, tossed with a whole loaf of Steven's wheat bread torn to pieces, softened with stock, and spiced with loads of sage and thyme.

  We started the evening before, baking several loaves of bread and checking the progress of our thawing bird. I also hacked a Queensland Blue handily to pieces (ten minutes flat--revenge is sweet) to cook down for pumpkin pies. Lily helped roll out the dough. Both girls have always helped with Thanksgiving dinner, since they were tall enough to stand on a chair and mix the stuffing with their hands like a splendid mud pie. One year earlier, at ages eight and seventeen, they had taken responsibility for an entire holiday meal when I was sidelined with a broken leg. With some heavy-lifting help from Steven they pulled it off beautifully: turkey, pies and all. Cooking is 80 percent confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice.

  On Thursday morning we baked the pies. In the afternoon we roasted sweet potatoes, braised winter squash, sauteed green beans with chestnuts, boiled and mashed the potatoes, all while keeping a faithful eye on Mr. T. By herself, Lily cracked half a dozen eggs into a bowl (subtract $1.25 from the I.O. Mama column) and made the corn pudding, using corn we'd cut from the cob and frozen in summer. Our garden provided everything, with one exception. Cranberries mostly grow farther north. I'd planted a small experimental cranberry patch but had nothing yet to show for my efforts. We discussed a cranberryless Thanksgiving, and agreed that would be like kissing through a screen door. Who needs it?

  Did we need it--was it essential that this feast be 100 percent pure Hoppsolver-grown? Personal quests do have a way of taking on lives of their own, even when nobody else knows or cares: recreational runners push themselves another mile, Scrabblers keep making bigger words. Our locavore project nudged us constantly toward new personal bests. But it always remained fascination, not fanaticism. We still ate out at restaurants with friends sometimes, and happily accepted invitations to dine at their homes. People who knew about our project would get flustered sometimes about inviting us, or when seeing us in a restaurant would behave as if they'd caught the cat eating the canary. We always explained, "We're converts in progress, not preachers. No stone tablets." Our Thanksgiving dinner would include a little California olive oil, a pinch of African nutmeg, and some Virginia flour that likely contained wheat from Pennsylvania and points north. Heeding the imperatives of tradition, we also bought a bag of lipstick-colored organic cranberries from Wisconsin. As the first store-bought fruit or vegetable to enter our house in many months, they looked wildly exotic lounging on our counter, dressed in their revealing cellophane bag. All of us, I think, secretly fondled them before Camille cooked them into a gingery sauce.

  Our guests came over in the afternoon to hang out in the kitchen and inhale while everything roasted and braised. We had given away some of our harvested Bourbon Reds, but Mr. Thanksgiving had been chosen while still on his feet, headed all his life for this appointment with our table. He weighed eighteen pounds, even without the mega-breast the Broad-Breasted Whites push around. Historic breeds tend to have proportionally more dark meat, and true to type, this guy made up for his narrower chest with a lot of leg, thigh, and overall heft. His color and texture were so different from the standard turkey, it's hard to compare them. He was a pleasure to cook, remaining exceptionally moist and tender. Thanks to a thin layer of egg-yolk-colored fat under the skin of the breast, the meat seemed to baste itself and gained a delicate aroma and flavor reminiscent, I swear, of lobster. The prices these birds earn on the specialty market are deserved. Taste is the reason for the success of Slow Food USA's turkey project, through which customers sign up in springtime for heritage-breed turkeys delivered by farmers at Thanksgiving. This Bourbon Red, we and our friends agreed when we bit into him, was the richest, most complex-flavored turkey we had eaten.

  But a perfect turkey is no more important than any other part of this ritual: lighting the candles, passing the gravy, telling some of the same stories every time. Eating until you swear you are miserable, and then happily eating dessert too. In addition to the pumpkin pies, our friend Marusa brought a strudel she had learned to make as a young girl in Slovenia. She apologized for its shape, explaining that for holidays it was supposed to be turned like a horseshoe but she didn't have the right pan. Everyone told her, of course, that it didn't matter, it would taste the same. But I understood her longing to re-create in every detail a comestible memory. It's why we'd needed the cranberries for the tart, pinky tinge that oozes into the gravy and makes everything Thanksgiving. It's why we go to the trouble to make a meal with more vegetable courses than many people consume in a week, and way more bird than anyone needs at one sitting.

  Having more than enough, whether it came from the garden or the grocery, is the agenda of this holiday. In most cases it may only be a pageant, but holidays are symbolic anyway, providing the dotted lines on the social-contract treasure map we've drawn up for our families and nations. As pageantry goes, what could go more to the heart of things than this story of need, a dread of starvation, and salvation arriving through the unexpected blessing of harvest? Even feigning surprise, pretending it was unexpected and saying a ritual thanks, is surely wiser than just expecting everything so carelessly. Wake up now, look alive, for here is a day off work just to praise Creation: the turkey, the squash, and the corn, these things that ate and drank sunshine, grass, mud, and rain, and then in the shortening days laid down their lives for our welfare and onward resolve. There's the miracle for you, the absolute sacrifice that still holds back seeds: a germ of promise to do the whole thing again, another time.

  Oh, yes, I know the Squanto story, we replayed it to death in our primitive grade-school pageantry ("Pilgrim friends! Bury one fish beneath each corn plant!"). But that hopeful affiliation ended so badly, I hate to keep bringing it up. Bygones are what they are. In my household credo, Thanksgiving is Creation's birthday party. Praise harvest, a pause and sigh on the breath of immortality.

  Snow fell on our garden in December, leaving the dried corn stalks and withered tomato vines standing black on white like a pen-and-ink drawing titled Rest. I postponed looking at seed catalogs for awhile. Those of us who give body and soul to projects that never seem to end--child rearing, housecleaning, gardening--know the value of the occasional closed door. We need our moments of declared truce.

  The farmers' market closed for the year. We paid our last call to the vendors there, taking phone numbers and promising to keep in touch for all kinds of reasons: we would miss our regular chats; we would need advice about the Icelandic sheep we were getting in the spring; we might drive out sometimes to get winter greens from their cold frames. We stocked up on enough frozen meat to see us through winter, including a hefty leg of lamb for one of our holiday dinners.

  The tunnel of winter had settled over our lives, ushered in by that great official Hoodwink, the end of daylight saving time. Personally I would vote for one more hour of light on winter evenings instead of the sudden, extra-early blackout. Whose idea was it to jilt us this way, leaving us in cold November with our unsaved remnants of daylight petering out before the workday ends? In my childhood, as early as that, I remember observing the same despair every autumn: the feeling that sunshine, summertime, and probably life itself had passed me by before I'd even finished a halfway decent tree fort. But mine is not to question those who command the springing forward and the falling back. I only vow each winter to try harder to live like a potato, with its tacit understanding that time is time, no matter what any clock might say. I get through the hibernation months by hovering as c
lose as possible to the woodstove without actual self-immolation, and catching up on my reading, cheered at regular intervals by the excess of holidays that collect in a festive logjam at the outflow end of our calendar.

  We are a household of mixed spiritual backgrounds, and some of the major holidays are not ours, including any that commands its faithful to buy stuff nobody needs. But we celebrate plenty. We give away our salsas and chutneys as gifts, and make special meals for family and friends: turkey and stuffing. Leg of lamb with mint jelly and roasted root vegetables tossed with rosemary and olive oil. For New Year's Day, the traditional southern black-eyed peas and rice, for good luck. Always in the background, not waiting for a special occasion, is the businesslike whir of the bread-machine paddles followed by the aroma of Steven's bread-of-the-day filling the whole house. We have our ways of making these indoor months a more agreeable internment.

  When a brand-new organic corn chip factory opened its doors twenty miles from our house, at least one member of our family took it as a sign that wishes do come true. But finding wheat flour for our bread continued to be our most frustrating pursuit. A historic mill five miles from our house processes corn and other specialty flours, but not whole wheat. So we were excited to discover a wheat-flour mill about an hour's drive away, a family operation we were happy to support. But the product, frankly, wasn't what we wanted: bromide-bleached white flour. They also sold a biscuit mix fortified with MSG. We asked if they could process batches of whole wheat or unbleached white flour for us, but we were just one family without enough influence to change even a small company's program. We needed fellow locavores to add clout to our quest, and in time we'll have them. For the time being we liberally supplemented the local product with an organic brand made from wheat grown in Vermont. We sometimes made our own pasta, but more commonly were buying that, too, from outside our state. Ditto for breakfast cereals, though the motherlode was a large package of David and Elsie's amazing oatmeal they sent us as a gift. Some things followed us home from Italy, too, including permanently influenced tastes in wine. But we stuck by our commitment to local meats and produce. In the realm of processed foods, we'd mostly forgotten what's out there.