Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

by Barbara Kingsolver

  But when the question comes up, especially when winter is dead upon us, I feel funny about answering honestly. Maybe I’m a little embarrassed to be a dweeby ant in a grasshopper nation. Or I’m afraid it will come as a letdown to confess we’re not suffering as we should. Or that I’ll sound as wacky as Chef January Pesto, to folks trying to eat locally who are presently stuck with farmers’ markets closed for the season.

  If you’re reading this in midwinter and that is your situation, put the thought away. Just never mind, come back in six months. Eating locally in winter is easy. But the time to think about that would be in August.

  * * *

  Getting Over the Bananas

  BY CAMILLE

  Many summers ago my best friend Kate, from Tucson, came out to visit our farm in Virginia for the first time. She was enamored of our beautiful hills, liked working in our garden, and happily helped pick blackberries from the sea of brambles that skirt the surrounding fields. She did her part, carrying with us the armloads of beans, cucumbers, squash, and tomatoes that came out of our garden on a daily basis. But one day, on a trip to the grocery store, we hit a little problem. When my parents asked if there was anything in particular she would like to eat, she replied, “Let’s get some bananas!”

  My parents exchanged a glance and asked her for another suggestion.

  “Why not bananas?” she asked, feeling really baffled by their refusal. My mother is not the type to say no to a guest. She waited until we were in the car to explain to Kate that it seemed wasteful to buy produce grown hundreds of miles away when we had so much fresh fruit right now, literally in our backyard. We’d picked two gallons of blackberries that very morning. She didn’t want to see them get moldy while we were eating bananas.

  “Plus, think of all the gasoline it takes to bring those bananas here,” Mom pointed out. My friend was quiet while the wheels turned inside her head. “I never thought about that before,” she admitted.

  Kate has grown up to become passionate about farming and eating organic food. Since the banana incident, she has volunteered on small farms and developed a sincere interest in agricultural methods that preserve biodiversity. She looks back at that conversation in the grocery store as a life-changing moment. Some things you learn by having to work around the word “no.”

  Of course local eating gets trickier in wintertime. Fresh fruits and vegetables are rare or just gone then, for most of us. In the colder months we have to think roots, not fruits. Potatoes, carrots, beets, turnips, parsnips, and celariac cover the full spectrum of color. Winter squash are delicious too; most people I know have never eaten one, probably because they never needed to. They couldn’t see them for all the bananas in the way.

  Each season requires thinking about food in a different way. In her book Local Flavors, Deborah Madison writes that when she teaches a fresh summer eggplant dish in her cooking classes, students always say two things: “Wow, I never liked eggplant before, but I love this!” and “What kind of eggplants should I buy in December, to make this for Christmas?” It takes a while for them to realize that these particular fresh eggplants were so yummy because they weren’t buying them in the winter. Most of us agree to put away our sandals and bikinis when the leaves start to turn, even if they’re our favorite clothes. We can learn to apply similar practicality to our foods. Here are some delicious winter-vegetable recipes, along with a week of dinners for the cold months at our house.

  BRAISED WINTER SQUASH

  2 pounds winter squash, peeled, halved, and sliced into

  ½-inch rounds 2 tablespoons butter

  2 cups apple cider

  1 teaspoon salt

  Rosemary and pepper to taste

  Melt butter in skillet with rosemary; after a few minutes add the squash, salt, and cider. You may need to add some additional cider (or water), enough to cover the squash. Bring to a boil, then lower heat and braise for 20 minutes or until tender. At this point the juice should be reduced to a glaze. If not, raise heat for a few minutes until excess liquid evaporates. Add pepper and a splash of balsamic vinegar if you like.

  BUTTERNUT BEAN SOUP

  (serves 4)

  1½ cups dried white beans, soaked overnight and drained

  3 medium portobello mushroom caps, sliced (optional)

  6 garlic cloves, finely chopped

  1 tablespoon thyme

  1 tablespoon sage

  4 teaspoons rosemary

  Combine beans and spices in a large saucepan, add water to cover amply, and simmer for 30 to 40 minutes, until beans are tender and most water has cooked off. Add mushrooms toward the end.

  2 butternut or hubbard squash, halved lengthwise and seeded

  Olive oil

  While beans are cooking, drizzle a large roasting pan with olive oil and arrange squash skin side down. Cook at 400° for about 40 minutes, until fully tender when pierced with a fork. Remove from oven and serve each half squash filled with a generous scoop of bean soup.

  VEGETARIAN CHILI

  1 pound dry kidney beans, soaked overnight and drained 1 cup chopped carrots

  2 large onions, chopped

  1 cup frozen peppers (or ½ cup dried) 3 cloves garlic, minced

  Olive oil

  28 ounces canned tomatoes, undrained

  4 cups vegetable stock or tomato juice

  3–5 tablespoons chili powder

  4–5 bay leaves

  1 tablespoon cumin

  Sauté garlic, peppers, and onions in olive oil until golden, add chopped carrots, and cook until tender. Combine with beans and remaining ingredients; stir well. Thin with extra water, stock, or tomato juice as needed. Cover and simmer for one hour. If you are related to my mother, you have to add 8 ounces of elbow macaroni, 15 minutes before serving.

  SWEET POTATO QUESADILLAS

  2 medium sweet potatoes

  ½ onion

  1 clove garlic

  1 tablespoon oregano

  1 tablespoon basil

  1 teaspoon cumin

  Chile powder to taste

  Olive oil for sauté

  Cut sweet potatoes into chunks, cook in steamer basket or microwave until soft, then mash. Chop and sauté garlic and onion in a large skillet. Add spices and sweet potato and mix well, adding a little water if it’s too sticky. Turn burner very low to keep warm without burning.

  4 flour tortillas

  4 ounces Brie or other medium soft cheese

  2–3 leaves Swiss chard (or other greens)

  Preheat oven to 400°. Oil a large baking sheet, spread tortillas on it to lightly oil one side, then spread filling on half of each. Top with slices of Brie and shredded chard, then fold tortillas to close (oiled side out). Bake until browned and crisp (about 15 minutes); cut into wedges for serving.

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

  WINTER MEAL PLAN

  Sunday ~ Roast leg of lamb with mint jelly, baked Yukon Golds, and multicolored beet salad

  Monday ~ Vegetarian chili

  Tuesday ~ Pasta with pesto, olives, and grated cheese

  Wednesday ~ Steak with winter potato salad or baked sweet potatoes

  Thursday ~ Bean burritos with sautéed onion and dried tomatoes

  Friday ~ Crock-Pot chicken soup with vegetables, served with warm bread

  Saturday ~ Cheese and mushroom tortellini with tomato sauce

  * * *

  19 • HUNGRY MONTH

  February–March

  As I grow older, more of my close friends are elderly people. I suppose I am auditioning, in some sense, to join their club. My generation will no doubt persist in wearing our blue jeans right into the nursing homes, kicking out Lawrence Welk when we get there and cranking up “Bad Moon Rising” to maximum volume. But I do find myself softening to certain features of the elder landscape. Especially, I’m coming to understand that culture’s special regard for winter. It’s the season to come through. My eighty-four-year-old neig
hbor is an incredibly cheerful person by all other standards, but she will remark of a relative or friend, “Well, she’s still with us after the winter.”

  It’s not just about icy sidewalks and inconvenience: she lost two sisters and a lifelong friend during recent winters. She carries in living memory a time when bitter cold and limited diets compromised everyone’s immunities, and the weather forced people to hunker down and share contagions. Winter epidemics took their heartbreaking due, not discriminating especially between the old and the young. For those of us who have grown up under the modern glow of things like vaccinations, penicillin, and central heat, it’s hard to retain any real sense of this. We flock indoors all the time, to work and even to exercise, sharing our germs in all seasons. But vitamins are ready at hand any time, for those who care, and antibiotics mop up the fallout.

  Tying my family’s nutritional fortunes to the seasons did not really involve any risk for us, of course. But it did acquaint us in new ways with what seasons mean, and how they matter. The subtle downward pulse of temperatures and day lengths created a physical rhythm in our lives, with beats and rests: long muscles, long light; shorter days, shorter work, and cold that drew us deeper into thoughts and plans, under plaster ceilings instead of an open sky. I watched the rank-and-file jars in our pantry decline from army to platoon, and finally to lonely sentries staggered along the shelves. We weren’t rationing yet, but I couldn’t help counting the weeks until our first spring harvests and the happy reopening day of the farmers’ market. I had a vision of our neighbors saying of us, “Well, they’re still with us after the winter.”

  In late February, official end of “Hungry Month,” I was ready to believe we and all our animals had come through the lean times unscathed. And then one of our turkey hens took to standing around looking droopy. She let her wings drop to the ground instead of folding them on her back in normal turkey fashion. Her shoulders hunched and her head jutted forward, giving her a Nixonesque air—minus the eyebrows and crafty agenda. This girl just looked dazed.

  Oh, no, I thought. Here we go. Farm animals lucky enough to live on pasture must deal with winter eventually, and health challenges similar to those faced by people in previous generations: less fresh air, more indoor congregation and risk of contagion, and the trial of surviving on stored hay or grain instead of fresh greens and hunted protein. In the realm of contagious maladies, poultry husbandry is notoriously challenging. And turkeys are even more disease-prone than chickens. “You never see it coming,” a turkey-experienced friend of mine had warned when we first got our poults. “One day they’re walking around looking fine. Next thing you know, drop-dead Fred!” The list of afflictions that can strike down a turkey would excite any hypochondriac: blackhead roundworm, crop bind, coccidiosis, paratyphoid, pullorum disease, and many more. In one of my poultry handbooks, the turkey chapter is subtitled, “A Dickens to Raise.”

  So far, though, my turkeys had stayed hale and hearty and I’d taken all the doom-saying with a grain of salt. Virtually all turkey-info sources in existence (including my friend with her drop-dead Freds) refer to the Broad-Breasted White, the standard factory-farm turkey that’s also the choice of most hobby farmers and 4-H projects, simply because the alternatives aren’t well known. My heirloom Bourbon Reds were a different bird, not bred for sluggardly indoor fattening but for scrappy survival in the great outdoors. They retain a genetic constitution for foraging, flying, mating, and—I hoped—resisting germs.

  Even so, my goal of keeping these birds alive through the winter and into their second year for breeding was statistically audacious. The longer a bird is kept, the greater its chances of being overwhelmed by pathogens. The great majority of modern turkeys can expect an earthly duration of only four months before meeting their processor. Free-range turkeys may take as long as six months to reach slaughter size. But any bird that lives past its first Thanksgiving inhabits a domain occupied by fewer than one-half of one percent of domestic turkeys. At nine months, my flock had now entered that elite age bracket, among the oldest living turkeys in America. When I undertook to keep a naturally breeding flock, I hadn’t thought much about what I was up against.

  Nor did I have any clue, now, which possible turkey ailment my poor droopy hen might have. The drear blackhead roundworm topped my worry list, since its inventory of symptoms began with “droopy aspect,” proceeding from there into “aspects” too unpleasant to mention. I immediately removed Miss Droop from the rest of the flock, assuming she’d be contagious. I’ve had kids in preschool—I know that much. I ushered her out of the big outdoor pen attached to the poultry house, and escorted her several hundred yards into an isolation room in the cellar of our big barn. Yes, it’s the same one where we sequester the death-row roosters; I didn’t discuss that with her.

  In fact, when I shut her in there by herself she immediately perked up, raising her head and folding her wings onto her back, shaking her fluffed feathers neatly back into place, looking around brightly for what she might find to do next. I hardly trusted this miracle recovery, but an hour later when I came back to check on her she was still perky and now calling desperately for her friends. (Turkey hens hate being alone.) I decided I must have worried the whole thing out of thin air.

  I led her back up to the turkey pen. She walked into the midst of her brethren, heaved a great turkey sigh, and drooped back down again: head hunched, wings dragging the ground. Okay, I wasn’t imagining it, she really had something. I shepherded her back out and down to the barn again. And once again, watched in astonishment as she lifted her head brightly and began to walk around, looking for something to eat.

  I stared at her. “Are you goldbricking?” I demanded.

  It was a sunny Saturday, our first little sneak preview of spring. Steven was down in the new orchard working on the fence. I decided my poultry patient could use a mental health day. I let her out of the barn and we walked together down the road toward the orchard. She could get some sunshine and fresh greens, and I’d see if Steven needed help with the fence. He saw us coming down the lane together, and laughed. Turkey herders are not a respected class of people.

  “She needs some fresh pasture,” I said defensively. “She has some kind of droopy sickness.”

  “She looks fine,” he said (which was maddeningly true), and went back to the fence that’s meant to discourage deer from eating our young pear orchard. For a few minutes I watched Ms. Turkey happily foraging among the trees, pecking at seed heads, alerting to any small movement of insects among the clumps of grass. She seemed as healthy as the day she was born. Some of our trees, on the other hand, showed signs of deer damage. I inspected them closely and considered going back up to the shed to get the lop shears. This winter day would be a good time for pruning the fruit trees.

  Steven yelled, “Hey, knock it off!”

  I looked up to see he wasn’t talking to me. My charge had wandered over to him, approaching from behind and reaching up with her beak to give his jacket a good tug, issuing a turkey mandative I would translate as: Hey, look at me!

  He nudged her away, but she persisted. After several more tugs, he turned to face her directly, planted his feet, and made a very manly sort of huff. On that cue she coyly turned her tail toward him, jutted her neck, and dropped her wings to the ground.

  Oh, my goodness. It wasn’t Hey, look at me. It was Hey, sailor, new in town? That’s what she had: love sickness. Steven shot me a look I will not translate here.

  “Stop that,” I yelled. “He is so not your type!” I ran to interrupt her, in case she meant to move their relationship to the next level.

  Poor thing, how would she know? She was raised by humans, with no opportunity to imprint on adult turkeys of either gender or observe proper turkey relations. As far as she knew, I was her mother. It’s only logical that the person I married would strike her as a good catch.

  As quickly as possible I ushered her back to the turkey pen, putting the kibosh on her plot to win away my husband.
But now what? We’d kept two males and six females for breeding purposes, with no real logic behind this number beyond a hope that we’d still have enough, in case we lost any birds over the winter. Were they now all about to come into season? Would our two toms suddenly wake up and start killing each other over this droopy Lolita? And what about the other hens? Who needed to be separated from whom, for how long? Would every hen need her own nest, and if so, what would it look like?

  I had assumed I’d cross all these bridges when I came to them. I remember harboring exactly this kind of unauthorized confidence before I had my first baby, also, only to look back eventually upon my ignorance and bang my head with the flat of my hand. Now, suddenly, long before I’d ever expected any shenanigans, like parents of turkey teens everywhere, I was caught by surprise. They’re too young for this, it’s only February! I went indoors to check our farm library for anything I could find about turkey mating behavior.

  I spent way too much of a beautiful day inside, on the floor, with books stacked all around me. Our poultry husbandry manuals contained a total of nothing about turkey sex. I kept looking, checking indices for various barnyard euphemisms: nothing. Honestly, our kids’ bookshelves had over the years been furnished with more literature in the “Now That You’re Growing Up” department. You’d think some turkey fundamentalists had been in here burning books.

  The real problem, of course, was that I was looking for a category of information nobody has needed for decades. The whole birds-and-bees business has been bred out of turkeys completely, so this complex piece of former animal behavior is now of no concern to anyone. Large-scale turkey hatcheries artificially inseminate their breeding stock. They extract the eggs in a similarly sterile manner and roll them into incubators, where electric warmth and automatic egg-turning devices stand in for motherhood. For the farmers who acquire and raise these hatchlings, the story is even simpler: fatten them as quickly as possible to slaughter size, then off with their heads. That’s it. Poultry handbooks don’t go into mating behavior because turkey mating has gone the way of rubberized foundation garments and the drive-in movie.