Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

by Barbara Kingsolver

  Winter is also the best time for baking: fruit pies and cobblers, savory vegetable pies, spicy zucchini breads, shepherd’s pies covered with a lightly browned crust of mashed potatoes. The hot oven is more welcome now than in summertime, and it recaptures the fruits and vegetables we put away in season. We freeze grated zucchini, sliced apples, and other fillings in the amounts required by our pie and bread recipes.

  So many options, and still that omnipresent question about what local fare one could possibly eat in January. I do understand the concern. Healthier eating generally begins with taking one or two giant steps back from the processed-foods aisle. Thus, the ubiquitous foodie presumptions about fresh-is-good, frozen-is-bad, and salads every day. I’ve enjoyed that program myself, marking it as progress from the tinned green beans and fruit cocktail of my childhood era when produce aisles didn’t have so much of everything all the time.

  While declining to return to the canned-pear-half-with-cottage-cheese cookery I learned in high school Home Ec, I’ve reconsidered some of my presumptions. Getting over the frozen-foods snobbery is important. The broccoli and greens from our freezer stand in just fine for fresh salads, not just nutritionally but aesthetically. I think creatively in winter about using fruit and vegetable salsas, chutneys, and pickles, all preserved back in the summer when the ingredients were rolling us over. Chard and kale are champion year-round producers (ours grow through the snow), and will likely show up in any farmers’ market that’s open in winter. We use fresh kale in soups, steamed chard leaves for wrapping dolmades, sautéed chard in omelets.

  Another of our cold-weather saviors is winter squash, a vegetable that doesn’t get enough respect. They’re rich in beta-carotenes, tasty, versatile, and keep their youth as mysteriously as movie stars. We grow yellow-fleshed hubbards, orange butternuts, green-striped Bush Delicata, and an auburn French beauty called a potimarron that tastes like roasted chestnuts. I arranged an autumnal pile of these in a big wooden bread bowl in October, as a seasonal decoration, and then forgot to admire them after a while. I was startled to realize they still looked great in January. We would finally use the last one in April. I’ve become a tad obsessive about collecting winter squash recipes, believing secretly that our family could live on them indefinitely if the world as we know it should end. My favorite so far is white beans with thyme served in a baked hubbard-squash half. It’s an easy meal, impressive enough for company.

  With stuff like this around, who needs iceberg lettuce? Occasionally we get winter mesclun from farming friends with greenhouses, and I have grown spinach under a cold frame. But normal greens season is spring. I’m not sure how lettuce specifically finagled its way, in so many households, from special-guest status to live-in. I tend to forget about it for the duration. At a January potluck or dinner party I’ll be taken by surprise when a friend casually suggests, “Bring a green salad.” I’ll bring an erstwhile salad of steamed chard with antipasto tomatoes, crumbled goat cheese, and balsamic vinegar. Or else everybody’s secret favorite: deviled eggs.

  In our first year of conscious locavory (locivory?) we encountered a lot of things we hadn’t expected: the truth about turkey sex life; the recidivism rate of raccoon corn burglars; the size attained by a zucchini left unattended for twenty-four hours. But our biggest surprise was January: it wasn’t all that hard. Our winter kitchen was more relaxed, by far, than our summer slaughterhouse-and-cannery. November brought the season of our Thanksgiving for more reasons than one. The hard work was over. I’d always done some canning and freezing, but this year we’d laid in a larder like never before, driven by our pledge. Now we could sit back and rest on our basils.

  “Driven” is putting it mildly, I confess. Scratch the surface of any mother and you’ll find Scarlett O’Hara chomping on that gnarly beet she’d yanked out of the ground. “I’ll never go hungry again” seems to be the DNA-encoded rallying cry for many of us who never went hungry in the first place. When my family headed into winter my instincts took over, abetted by the Indian Lore books I’d read in childhood, which all noted that the word for February in Cherokee (and every other known native tongue) was “Hungry Month.”

  After the farmers’ market and our garden both closed for the season, I took an inventory of our pantry. During our industrious summer we’d canned over forty jars of tomatoes, tomato-based sauces, and salsa. We’d also put up that many jars of pickles, jams, and fruit juice, and another fifty or so quarts of dried vegetables, mostly tomatoes but also soup beans, peppers, okra, squash, root vegetables, and herbs. In pint-sized freezer boxes we’d frozen broccoli, beans, squash, corn, pesto, peas, roasted tomatoes, smoked eggplants, fire-roasted peppers, cherries, peaches, strawberries, and blueberries. In large ziplock bags we froze quantities of our favorite snack food, whole edamame, which Lily knows how to thaw in the microwave, salt, and pop from the pod straight down the hatch. I do realize I’m lucky to have kids who prefer steamed soybeans to Twinkies. But about 20 million mothers in Japan have kids like that too, so it’s not a bolt out of the blue.

  Our formerly feisty chickens and turkeys now lay in quiet meditation (legs-up pose) in the chest freezer. Our onions and garlic hung like Rapunzel’s braids from the mantel behind the kitchen woodstove. In the mudroom and root cellar we had three bushels of potatoes, another two of winter squash, plus beets, carrots, melons, and cabbages. A pyramid of blue-green and orange pumpkins was stacked near the back door. One shelf in the pantry held small, alphabetized jars of seeds, saved for starting over—assuming spring found us able-bodied and inclined to do this again.

  That’s the long and short of it: what I did last summer. Most evenings and a lot of weekends from mid-August to mid-September were occupied with cutting, drying, and canning. We’d worked like wage laborers on double shift while our friends were going to the beach for summer’s last hurrah, and retrospectively that looks like a bum deal even to me. But we had taken a vacation in June, wedged between the important dates of Cherries Fall and the First of Tomato. Next summer maybe we’d go to the beach. But right now, looking at all these jars in the pantry gave me a happy, connected feeling, as if I had roots growing right through the soles of my shoes into the dirt of our farm.

  I understand that’s a pretty subjective value, not necessarily impressive to an outsider. It’s a value, nonetheless. Food security is no longer the sole concern of the paranoid schizophrenic. Some of my very sane friends in New York and Washington, D.C., tell me that city households are advised now to have a two-month food supply on hand at all times. This is advice of a different ilk from the duct-tape-and-plastic response to terrorist attacks, or the duck-and-cover drills of my childhood. We now have looming threats larger than any cold-hearted human’s imagination. Global climate change has created dramatic new weather patterns, altered the migratory paths of birds, and shifted the habitats of disease-carrying organisms, opening the season on catastrophes we are ill-prepared to predict.

  “It’s not a matter of ‘maybe’ anymore,” my friend from D.C. told me over the phone. A professional photographer, she had been to New Orleans several months after Hurricane Katrina to document the grim demise of a piece of our nation we’d assumed to be permanent. “I’m starting to feel disaster as a real thing—that it’s not if but when. And I feel helpless. When they say you should be keeping that much food on hand, all I can think to do is go to Costco and buy a bunch of cans! Can’t I do better than that?” We made a date for the end of next tomato season: she would drive down for a girlfriend weekend and we could can stuff together. Tomato therapy.

  Our family hadn’t been bracing for the sky to fall, but we now had the prescribed amount of food on hand. I felt thankful for our uncommon good luck. Or if not luck, then the following of our strange bliss through the labors it took to get us here, like the industrious ants of Aesop’s fable working hard to prepare because it’s their nature. Our luck was our proximity to land where food grows, and having the means to acquire it.

  Technically, most U.S.
citizens are that lucky: well more than half live within striking distance of a farmers’ market (some estimates put it at 70 percent), and most have the cash to buy some things beyond their next meal. One of those things could be a thirty-pound bag of tomatoes, purchased some Saturday in July and taken home to be turned into winter foods. Plenty of people have freezers that are humming away at this moment to chill, among other things, some cardboard. That space could be packed with some local zucchini and beans. Any garage or closet big enough for two months’ worth of canned goods from Costco could stash, instead, some bushels of potatoes, onions, and apples, purchased cheaply in season. Even at the more upscale farmers’ markets in the D.C. area, organic Yukon Gold potatoes run $2 a pound in late summer. A bushel costs about the same as dinner for four in a good restaurant, and lasts 2,800 times as long. Local onions and Ginger Gold apples at the same market cost less than the potatoes, and the same or less than their transported counterparts at a nearby Whole Foods.

  It doesn’t cost a fortune, in other words. Nor does it require a pickup truck, or a calico bonnet. Just the unique belief that summer is the right time to go to the fresh market with cash in hand and say to some vendors: I’ll take all you have. It’s an entirely reasonable impulse, to stock up on what’s in season. Most of my farming and gardening friends do it. Elsewhere, Aesop is history. Grasshoppers rule, ants drool.

  Three-quarters of the way through our locavore year, the process was becoming its own reward for us. We were jonesing for a few things, certainly, including time off: occasionally I clanged dirty pot lids together in frustration and called kitchen strikes. But more often than not, dinnertime called me into the kitchen for the comfort of predictable routines, as respite from the baked-on intellectual residue of work and life that is inevitably messier than pots and pans. In a culture that assigns nil prestige to domestic work, I usually self-deprecate when anyone comments on my gardening and cooking-from-scratch lifestyle. I explain that I have to do something brainless to unwind from my work, and I don’t like TV. But the truth is, I enjoy this so-called brainless work. I like the kind of family I can raise on this kind of food.

  Still, what kind of person doesn’t ask herself at the end of a hard day’s work: Was it worth it? Maybe because of the highly documented status of our experiment, I now felt compelled to quantify the work we had done in terms that would translate across the culture gap—i.e., moolah. I had kept detailed harvest records in my journal. Now I sat at my desk and added up columns.

  Between April and November, the full cash value of the vegetables, chickens, and turkeys we’d raised and harvested was $4,410. To get this figure I assigned a price to each vegetable and the poultry per pound on the basis of organic equivalents (mostly California imports) in the nearest retail outlet where they would have been available at the time we’d harvested our own. The value-added products, our several hundred jars of tomato sauce and other preserved foods, plus Lily’s full-year egg contribution, would add more than 50 percent to the cash value of our garden’s production.

  That’s retail value, of course, much more than we would have earned from selling our goods wholesale (as most farmers do), but it’s the actual monetary value to us, saved from our annual food budget by means of our own animal and vegetable production and processing. We also had saved by eating mostly at home, doing our own cooking, but that isn’t figured into the tally. Our costs, beyond seeds, chicken feed, and our own labor, had been minimal. Our second job in the backyard, as we had come to think of it, was earning us the equivalent of some $7,500 of annual income.

  That’s more than a hill of beans. In my younger days I spent a few years as a freelance journalist before I hit that mark. And ironically, it now happens to be the median annual income of laborers who work in this country’s fields and orchards. We who get to eat the literal fruits of our labors are the fortunate ones.

  I harbored some doubts that our family of four could actually consume (or give away as gifts) this dollar-value of food in a year. But that is only $1.72 per person, per meal; that we’d spent that much and more was confirmed by the grocery receipts I’d saved from the year before we began eating locally. As I sat at my desk leafing through those old receipts, they carried me down an odd paper trail through a time when we’d routinely bought things like BAGGED GALA APP ORG, NTP PANDA PFF, and ORNG VALNC 4#bg (I have no idea, but it set me back $1.99), with little thought for the places where these things had grown, if in fact they had grown at all.

  We were still going to the supermarket, but the receipts looked different these days. In the first six months of our local year we’d spent a total of $83.70 on organic flour (about twenty-five pounds a month) for our daily bread and weekly pizza dough, and approximately the same amount on olive oil. We’d spent about $5 a week on fair-trade coffee, and had also purchased a small but steady supply of nonlocal odds and ends like capers, yeast, cashews, raisins, lasagna noodles, and certain things I considered first aid: energy bars to carry in the purse against blood sugar emergencies; boxes of mac-and-cheese. Both my kids have had beloved friends who would eat nothing, literally, except macaroni and cheese out of a certain kind of box. I didn’t want anybody to perish on my watch.

  Still, our grocery-store bill for the year was a small fraction of what it had been the year before, and most of it went for regionally produced goods we had sleuthed out in our supermarket: cider vinegar, milk, butter, cheese, and wines, all grown and processed in Virginia. About $100 a month went to our friends at the farmers’ market for the meats and vegetables we purchased there. The market would now be closed for the rest of our record-keeping year, so that figure was deceptively high, including all the stocking up we’d done in the fall. In cash, our year of local was costing us well under 50¢ per meal. Add the $1.72-per-meal credit for the vegetables we grew, and it’s still a bargain. We were saving tons of money by eating, in every sense, at home.

  Our goal had not really been to economize, only to exercise some control over which economy we would support. We were succeeding on both counts. If we’d had to purchase all our vegetables as most households do, instead of pulling them out of our back forty, it would still be a huge money-saver to shop in our new fashion, starting always with the farmers’ market and organizing meals from there. I know some people will never believe that. It’s too easy to see the price of a locally grown tomato or melon and note that it’s higher (usually) than the conventionally grown, imported one at the grocery. It’s harder to see, or perhaps to admit, that all those NTP PANDA PFFs do add up. The big savings come from a habit of organizing meals that don’t include pricey processed additions.

  In some objective and measurable ways, we could see that our hard work had been worth the trouble. But the truth is we did it for other reasons, largely because it wasn’t our day job. Steven and I certainly could have earned more money by putting our farming hours into teaching more classes or meeting extra deadlines, using skills that our culture rewards and respects much more than food production and processing. Camille could have done the same via more yoga classes and hours at her other jobs. Lily was the only one of us, probably, who was maximizing her earning potential through farm labor.

  But spending every waking hour on one job is drudgery, however you slice it. After an eight-hour day at my chosen profession, enough is enough. I’m ready to spend the next two or three somewhere else, preferably outdoors, moving my untethered limbs to a worldly beat. Sign me up on the list of those who won’t maximize their earnings through a life of professionally focused ninety-hour weeks. Plenty of people do, I know, either perforce or by choice—overwork actually has major cachet in a society whose holy trinity is efficiency, productivity, and material acquisition. Complaining about it is the modern equivalent of public prayer. “Work,” in this context, refers to tasks that are stressful and externally judged, which the worker heartily longs to do less of. “Not working” is widely coveted but harder to define. The opposite of work is play, also an active verb. It could b
e tennis or bird-watching, so long as it’s meditative and makes you feel better afterward.

  Growing sunflowers and beans is like that, for some of us. Cooking is like that. So is canning tomatoes, and making mozzarella. Doing all of the above with my kids feels like family life in every happy sense. When people see the size of our garden or the stocks in our pantry and shake their heads, saying “What a lot of work,” I know what they’re really saying. This is the polite construction in our language for “What a dope.” They can think so. But they’re wrong.

  This is not to say family life is just la-di-dah around here. Classes and meetings and deadlines collide, mail piles get scary. Children forget to use their inside voices when charging indoors to demand what’s for dinner. Mothers may also forget to use them when advising that whoever’s junk is all over the table has three seconds to clear it up or IT’S GOING TO THE LANDFILL. Parent-teacher night rises out of nowhere, and that thing I promised to make for Lily’s something-or-other is never, ever due any time except tomorrow morning, Mama! Tears happen. On the average January weeknight, I was deeply grateful that I could now just toss a handful of spaghetti into a pot and reach for one of the quart jars of tomato sauce that Camille and I had canned the previous August. Our pantry had transformed. No longer the Monster Zucchini roadhouse brawl (do not enter without a knife), it was now a politely organized storehouse of healthy convenience foods. The blanched, frozen vegetables needed only a brief steaming to be table-ready, and the dried vegetables were easy to throw into the Crock-Pot with the chicken stock we made and froze after every roasted bird. For several full-steam-ahead weeks last summer, in countless different ways, we’d made dinner ahead. What do we eat in January? Everything.