Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

by Barbara Kingsolver

  To restore some old-fashioned sex to our farm, I was going to have to scour my sources for some decent sex ed. The Internet was no more help. A search for “turkey mating” scored 670,000 hits, mostly along the lines of this lively dispatch from the Missouri Department of Conservation: “More excitement this week—hunters statewide will find gobblers more responsive to calls! The key to success is sounding like a lovesick turkey hen.”

  I already had a lovesick turkey hen, no need to fake that one. I tried limiting my search to domestic turkeys rather than wild ones. I still got thousands of hits, but not one shred of fact about turkey hokey-pokey. I did learn that the bright blue-and-pink growths on a male turkey’s neck are called his “caruncle.” I learned that the name “turkey” for this solely North American bird comes from a 400-year-old geographic mistake made by the English. I learned that the French know this bird as a dindon sauvage. That is when I fled from the electronic library, returning to my limited but reassuring paper pages where I could feel safe from the random onslaught of savage ding-dongs.

  Finally there I hit pay dirt. My spouse has a weakness for antique natural history books. His collection of old volumes covers the gamut from Piaget and Audubon to William J. Long, an early-twentieth-century ethologist who attributed animal communications to a telepathic force he called “chumfo.” You may gather that I was desperate, to be plumbing these depths for help around the farm. But I found a thick tome by E. S. E. Hafez called The Behavior of Domestic Animals. Published mid-twentieth century, it’s probably the most modern entry in Steven’s collection, but for my purposes that was exactly the right era: animal science had advanced beyond chumfo, but had not yet taken the tomfoolery out of the toms.

  What caught my eye as I flipped through the book was a photograph with this caption: “Female turkey giving the sexual crouch to man…” Bingo! The text confirmed my worst suspicions: turkeys who had imprinted on humans, as hatchlings, would be prone to batting for the hominid team. But given the chance, the book said, they would likely be open-minded about turkey partners as well.

  Oh, good! Reading on, I learned that the characteristic droopy “crouch” is the first sign of sexual receptiveness in girl turkeys. Soon we could expect to see a more extended courtship interaction that would include stomping (boy), deeper crouch (girl), then mounting and much treading around as the male manipulated the female’s “erogenous area along the sides of the body,” followed by the complicated “copulatory sequence.” Domestic turkeys are promiscuous, I learned, with no inclination toward pair bonding. Egg laying would begin in about two weeks. A turkey hen’s instinct for sitting on the nest to brood the eggs, if that happened, would be triggered when enough of them accumulated in the nest. The magic number was somewhere between twelve and seventeen eggs.

  Eggs and nest were all theoretical at this point, but what concerned me most was the broody instinct getting switched on. These mothering instincts have been bred out of turkeys. For confinement birds the discouragement has been purposeful, and even heirloom breeds are mostly sold by hatcheries that incubate mechanically, so nobody is selecting for good maternal behaviors. Genes get passed on without regard for broody or nonbroody behavior. If anything, it’s probably a bother to hatchery operations when a mother gets possessive about her young.

  If I wanted to raise turkeys the natural way, I understood now that I was signing up for a strong possibility of failure, not to mention a deep involvement in the sexual antics of a domestic bird. My interests weren’t prurient (though you may come to doubt this later in the chapter). As a biologist and a PTA member, I have a healthy respect for the complex parameters of motherhood. The longer I think about a food industry organized around an animal that cannot reproduce itself without technical assistance, the more I mistrust it. Poultry, a significant part of the modern diet, is emblematic of the whole dirty deal. Having no self-sustaining bloodlines to back up the industry is like having no gold standard to underpin paper currency. Maintaining a naturally breeding poultry flock is a rebellion, at the most basic level, against the wholly artificial nature of how foods are produced.

  I was the rebel, that was my cause. I had more than just sentimental reasons for wanting to see my turkey hens brood and hatch their own babies, however unlikely that might be. I plowed on through my antique reference for more details on nesting and brooding, and what I might do to be a helpful midwife, other than boiling water or putting a knife under the bed. My new turkey-sex manual got better and better. “Male turkeys,” I read, “can be forced to broodiness by first being made drowsy, e.g. by an ample dose of brandy, and then being put on a nest with eggs. After recovery from the hangover, broodiness is established. This method was used extensively by farmers in Europe before incubators were available.”

  I don’t think of myself as the type to ply turkey menfolk with brandy and hoodwink them into fatherhood. But a girl needs to know her options.

  Six quarts of spaghetti sauce, four jars of dried tomatoes, four onions, one head of garlic at the end of a long, skinny, empty braid—and weeks to go. January is widely held to be the bugbear of local food, but the hungriest month is March, if you plan to see this thing through. Your stores are dwindling, your potatoes are sending pale feelers out into the void, but for most of us there is nothing new under the sun of muddy March, however it might intend to go out like a lamb. A few spring wildflowers, maybe, but no real eats. Our family was getting down to the bottom of our barrel.

  Which was a good thing for the chest freezer. I know people who layer stuff in there year after year, leaving it to future archaeologists, I gather, to read the good and bad green-bean years like tree rings. I’ve taken microbiology, and honestly, ick. I’m pretty fanatical about emptying the freezer completely before starting over. A quick inventory found our frozen beans long gone, but we still had sliced apples, corn, one whole turkey, and some smoked eggplant from last fall. Also plenty of zucchini, quelle surprise. We would not be the Crayola Family, then, but the one that survived on zucchini pie. Pretty cushy, as harrowing adventures go.

  Maybe March doesn’t get such a bad rap because it doesn’t feel hungry. If it’s not the end of winter, you can see it from here. Lily and I were now starting our vegetable and flower seeds indoors, puttering in earnest under the fluorescent lights of our homemade seedling shelves. She had given up all hope of further snow days. And one fine afternoon she bounced off the bus with the news that the fourth-graders were going to study gardening at school. For a kid like Lily, this was an unbelievable turn of events: Now, children, we are going to begin a unit on recess!

  It wasn’t just the fourth-graders, as it turned out. The whole school was that lucky, along with three other elementary schools in our county. School garden programs have lately begun showing up in schools from the trend-setting Bay Area to working-class Durham, North Carolina. Alice Waters founded the Berkeley programs, developing a curriculum that teaches kids, alongside their math and reading, how to plant gardens, prepare their own school lunches, and sit down to eat them together in a civil manner. She has provided inspiration nationwide for getting fresh-grown food into cafeterias.

  But most of the garden-learning programs scattered through our country’s schools have been created independently, as ours was. A local nonprofit helps support it, the school system has been cooperative, but our Learning Landscapes curriculum is the dream and full-time project of a green-thumbed angel named Deni. She helps the kindergartners grow popcorn and plant a rainbow of flowers to learn their colors. Second-graders make a special garden for hummingbirds, bees, and butterflies, while learning about pollination. Third-graders grow a pizza garden that covers the plant kingdom. Lily’s class was starting seeds they planned to set out in a colonial herb garden, giving some life to their Virginia history lessons. Each grade’s program is tied to concrete objectives the kids must know in order to pass their state-mandated testing.

  Virtually everyone I know in the school system feels oppressed by these testing regimes
hanging over everything. Teachers sense them as huge black clouds on the horizon of April. For the kids it’s more like a permanent threat of air attack. In our state—no kidding—they are called Standards of Learning, or “SOLs.” (I don’t think anyone intended the joke.) But Learning Landscapes works because it gets kids outdoors studying for tests while believing they are just playing in dirt.

  Deni knows how to get the approval of a school board, but she has a larger game plan for these kids than just passing the next exam. “One of the key things gardens can teach students is respect: for themselves, for others, and the environment,” she says. “It helps future generations gain an understanding of our food system, our forests, our water and air, and how these things are all connected.”

  From a biological perspective, the ultimate act of failure is to raise helpless kids. Not a parent I know who’s worth the title wants to do that. But our operating system values Advanced Placement Comparative Politics, for example, way, way ahead of Knowing How to Make Your Own Lunch. Kids who can explain how supernovas are formed may not be allowed to get dirty in play group, and many teenagers who could construct and manage a Web site would starve if left alone on a working food farm. That’s hardly their fault. We all may have some hungry months ahead of us, even hungry years, when a warmed-up globe changes the rules of a game we smugly thought we’d already aced. We might live to regret some of our SOL priorities. But the alumni of at least one Appalachian county’s elementary schools will know how to grow their own pizzas, and I’m proud of them. If I could fit that on a bumper sticker, I would.

  Legislating Local

  * * *

  The epidemic of childhood obesity in the United States has incited parents, communities, and even legislators to improve kids’ nutrition in one place they invariably eat: schools. Junk foods have been legally banned from many lunchrooms and school vending machines. But what will our nation’s youth eat instead—fresh local produce? As if!

  Dude, it’s going down. In 2004, in a National School Lunch Act amendment, Congress authorized a seed grant for the Farm to Cafeteria Program, promoting school garden projects and acquisition of local foods from small farms. The Local Produce Business Unit of the Department of Defense actually procures produce. Benefits of these programs, above and beyond the food, include agricultural education through gardening, farm visits, presentations by local farmers, and modest economic gains for the community. More than one-third of our states now have active farm-to-school programs; farm-to-college alliances are also growing.

  The USDA Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) has a Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program for purchasing local food. It provides coupons good for fresh produce purchased from farms, farmers’ markets, and roadside stands. In 2006, some $20 million in government funds provided these benefits to more than 2.5 million people.

  In a strong legislative move, Woodbury County, Iowa, mandated in 2006 that the county (subject to availability) “shall purchase…locally produced organic food when a department of Woodbury County serves food in the usual course of business.” Even the prisons are serving local food, in a county that truly recognizes the value of community support.

  For more information visit www.foodsecurity.org and www.farmtoschool.org.

  * * *

  STEVEN L. HOPP

  My pupils in the turkey coop were not such quick studies. The first hen who’d come into season was getting no action from either of the two males, whom we had lately been calling Big Tom and Bad Tom. These guys had been fanning their tails in urgent mating display since last summer, more or less constantly, but they directed the brunt of their show-off efforts toward me, each other, or any sexy thing I might leave sitting around, such as a watering can. They really tried hard with the watering can. Lolita kept plopping herself down where they’d have to trip over her, but they only had eyes for some shiny little item. She sulked, and I didn’t blame her. Who hasn’t been there?

  I determined to set a more romantic scene, which meant escorting Lolita and one of the toms into their own honeymoon suite, a small private room inside the main barn, and removing any watering cans from his line of sight. She practically had to connect the dots for him—no bras to unhook, heaven be praised—but finally he started to get the picture. She crouched, he approached, and finally stopped quivering his tailfeathers to impress her. After all these many months, it took him a couple of beats to shift gears from “Get the babe! Get the babe!” to “O-oh yess!” Inch by inch he walked up onto her back. Then he turned around in circles several times, s-l-o-w-l-y, like the minute hand of a clock, before appearing to decide on the correct orientation. I was ready to hear the case for artificial insemination. But it looked now like he was giving it a go.

  The final important event after all this awkward foreplay is what bird scientists call the “cloacal kiss.” A male bird doesn’t have anything you would call “a member,” or whatever you call it at your house. He just has an orifice, or cloaca, more or less the same equipment as the female except that semen is ejected from his, and eggs come out of hers later on. Those eggs will be fertile only if the two orifices have previously made the prescribed kind of well-timed contact.

  I watched, I don’t mind saying. Come on, wouldn’t you? Possibly you would not have stooped quite as low as I did for the better view, but geez, we don’t get cable out here. And this truly was an extraordinary event, something that’s nearly gone from our living world. For 99.9 percent of domestic turkeys, life begins in the syringe and remains sexless to the end. Few people alive have witnessed what I was about to see.

  Cloacal kiss is exactly the right name for it. The male really has to extend that orifice, like puckering up for a big smooch. Try to picture this, though: he’s standing on her back, tromping steadily and clutching his lady so as not to fall off. The full complement of her long tail-feather fan lies between his equipment and hers. The pucker has to be heroic to get around all that. Robert Browning said it perfectly: Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a Heaven for?

  Paradise arrives when a fellow has kneaded his lady’s erogenous wing zones for a long, long time with his feet, until she finally decides her suitor has worked himself up to the necessary fervor. Without warning, quick as an eyeblink, she flips up her tail feathers and reaches upward to meet him. Oh, my gosh! I gasped to see it.

  It was an air kiss.

  They really did miss. Mwah!—like a pair of divas onstage who don’t want to muss their lipstick. (Not Britney and Madonna.) But rare is the perfect first attempt, I know as well as the next person who has ever been young.

  She wandered off, slightly dazed, to a corner of the dark little room. He stared after her, his feathers all slack for once in his life, divining that this was not the time to put on a tail-shaking show. He knit his caruncled brow and surely would have quoted Shakespeare if he’d had it in him: Trip no further, pretty sweeting; journeys end in lovers meeting…

  She pecked listlessly at some grain on the dirt floor. Probably she’d been hoping for better room service.

  What’s to come is still unsure: in delay there lies no plenty. Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty, Youth’s a stuff will not endure.

  I left them there, to love again on the morrow. Or maybe in fifteen minutes. After all, they were kids.

  Animal behaviorists refer to a mating phenomenon called the “Coolidge effect,” a term deriving from an apocryphal story about the president and first lady. On an official visit to a government farm in Kentucky, they are said to have been impressed by a very industrious rooster. Mrs. Coolidge asked her guide how often the cockerel could be expected to perform his duty, and was informed: “Dozens of times a day.”

  “Please tell that to the president,” she said.

  The president, upon a moment’s reflection, asked, “Was this with the same hen each time?”

  “Oh, no, Mr. President,” the guide replied. “A different one each time.”

 
; The president smiled. “Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge.”

  Two weeks after our Lolita came down with lovesickness, the rest of the hens followed. Now we recognized the symptoms. Scientific as always in our barnyard, we applied the Coolidge effect, separating either Big Tom or Bad Tom with a new hen each day in the romantic barn room while the other tom chased the rest of the girls around the pasture. We had to keep the boys apart from one another, not so much because they fought (though they did), but because any time one of them managed to mount a hen, the other would charge like a bowling ball down the lane and topple the lovers most ungracefully, ka-pow. Nothing good was going to come of that.

  But after the February of Love dawned over our barnyard, it was followed by the March of the Turkey Eggs. We hoped this was good, although the first attempts looked like just one more wreck along the love-train track. It’s normal for a young bird to need a few tries, to get her oviduct work in order. But to be honest I didn’t even recognize the first one as an egg. I went into the turkey coop to refill the grain bin and almost stepped on a weird thing on the floor. I stooped down to poke at it: a pale bag of fluid, soft to the touch, teardrop-shaped with a rubbery white corkscrew at the pointy end. Hmmm. A small visitor from another planet? I tentatively decided it was an egg, but did not uncork the champagne.

  Soon, real eggs followed: larger and more pointed than chickens’ eggs, light brown with a cast of reddish freckles. I was thrilled with the first few. Then suddenly they were everywhere, dropped coyly on the floor like hankies: hither and yon about the coop, outside in the caged run, and even splat on the grass of the pasture. When the urge struck these girls, they delivered, like the unfortunate mothers one hears about having their babies in restaurant foyers and taxicabs.