Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

by Barbara Kingsolver

  I had fashioned what I thought to be a respectable turkey nest on the floor in one corner of the coop, but no one was using it. Clearly it didn’t look right to them, maybe not cozy enough. We built a big wooden box with open sides to set over the nest for protection. The turkeys roosted at night on high rafters inside their coop, and always flew around rambunctiously before going to bed. Bourbon Reds have wings and are not afraid to use them. Maybe the nest on the floor would have more appeal, I reasoned, if I made it safe from aerial assault.

  This struck some chord in the turkey psyche, but not the right one: the hens immediately began laying eggs on top of the plywood platform, about three feet off the ground. My reference book insisted turkeys will only use floor nests. My turkeys hadn’t heard about that. Within days I had no more eggs on the floor, but nearly two dozen in a precarious clutch on a plywood platform where they could easily roll off and smash. I cut down the sides of a big cardboard box to make a shallow tray, filled it with straw and leaves, and put the eggs in there.

  Finally I’d guessed right. The sight of this cozy pile of eggs in a computer-monitor shipping carton was just what it took to throw the hormonal switch. One by one, the turkey hens began sitting on the nest. After a fashion. They would lay an egg, sit just a few minutes longer, and leave. Soon I had more than thirty eggs in this platform nest and no mother worth a corsage, to say the least.

  Most of them did try, a little. As time passed and the pile grew to ridiculous proportions, they seemed to feel some dim sense of obligation. A hen would sit on the eggs for an hour. Then she’d hop up, wander away, and go get a snack. Or she would land on the nest, lay one egg, tromp around on the pile until she’d broken two, then eat them and go bye-bye. Often two hens would sit on the eggs together, amiable for awhile until they’d begin to tussle with one another. Sometimes this would escalate until they were fanning their tail feathers and displaying at one another, exactly the way the males do. Then, suddenly, they’d quit and go do lunch together. I became hopeful when one hen (not always the same one) would stay on the eggs until late morning, when I usually let all the turkeys out into the pasture. She would stay behind as the sisters nattered out the door, but always after a while she would decide she’d had all she could take of that, and scream to be let out with her friends for the rest of the day.

  With all due respect for very young mothers who are devoted to their children, I began to think of my hens as teen moms of the more stereotypical kind. “I’m not ready to be tied down” was the general mindset. “Free bird” was the anthem. Nobody was worrying over this growing pile of eggs, except me. I fretted as they strolled away, scolding each slacker mother: You turkey! Dindon sauvage, pardon my French. You’ve made your nest, now sit on it.

  My nagging had the predictable effect, i.e. none. I felt bereft. Most nights were still below freezing. What could be more pitiful than a huge nest of beautiful eggs sitting out in the cold? Potentially viable, valuable eggs left to die. That many heirloom turkey eggs, purchased mail-order for incubation, would cost about three hundred dollars, and that is nothing compared with the real products of awkward, earnest turkey love. But what was I supposed to do, sit on them myself?

  That, essentially, is what the professionals do. Our feed store carried several models of incubators, which I’d scrutinized more than once. This would be the simple answer: put the eggs in an electric incubator, watch them hatch, and raise baby turkeys myself, one more time. Turkeys that would, once again, grow up wanting to mate with something like me.

  Is it possible to rear eggs in an incubator and slip them under a female adult after they’ve hatched? Easy answer: Yes, and she will kill them. Possibly eat them, as horrifying as that sounds. Motherhood is the largest work of most lives, and natural selection cannot favor a huge investment of energy in genes that are not one’s own. It’s straightforward math: the next generation will contain zero young from individuals whose genes let them make that choice. In animals other than humans, adoption exists only in rare and mostly accidental circumstances.

  In the case of turkeys, the mother’s brain is programmed to memorize the sound of her chicks’ peeping the moment they hatch. This communication cements her bond with her young, causing her to protect them intensely during their vulnerable early weeks, holding her wings out and crouching to keep the kids hidden under something like a feathery hoop-skirt, day and night, while they make brief forays out into the world, learning to find their own food.

  Early-twentieth-century experiments (awful ones to contemplate) showed that deafened mother turkeys were unable to get the all-important signal from their young. These mothers destroyed their own chicks, even after sitting on the eggs faithfully for weeks.

  My hens seemed to have good ears, but the faithful sitting was not their long suit. Still, I didn’t buy an incubator. I wanted turkey chicks raised by turkey mothers, creatures that would literally know how to be true to their own kind. The project allows no shortcuts. If we could just get a first generation out of one of these mothers, the next ones would have both better genes and better rearing.

  The alternative possibility, a lot of botched hatchlings, made me sad. The temptation is to save the individual that pulls on your heartstrings, even at the cost of the breed. When I’d signed on to the small club of heritage animal breeders, part of the deal was refraining from this kind of sentimentality. Poor mothering instincts, runts, and genetic weaklings all have to be culled. In a human-centric world that increasingly (and wisely, in my opinion) defines all humans as intrinsically equal, it’s hard not to color this thinking outside of the lines. But the rules for healthy domestic animal populations are entirely unlike those we apply to ourselves. I came up against this when trying to explain to my nephew why we can’t let the white rooster mate with the brown hens. I decided to drop the subject for a few years. But I’ll bring it up again if he asks, because it’s important information: respect takes different forms for different species. The apple tree gains strength from strict breeding and regular pruning. So does the herd.

  Our purpose for keeping heritage animals is food-system security, but also something else that is less self-serving: the dignity of each breed’s true and specific nature. A Gloucester Old Spots hog in the pasture, descended from her own ancient line, making choices, minute by minute, about rooting for grubs and nursing her young, contains in her life a sensate and intelligent “pigness.” It’s a state of animal grace that never even touches the sausages-on-hooves in an industrial pig lot. One can only hope they’ve lost any sense of the porcine dignities stolen from them.

  If it seems a stretch to use the word dignity in the same sentence with pig, or especially turkey, that really proves my point. It was never their plan to let stupid white eunuchs take over, it was ours, and now the genuine, self-propagating turkeys with astute mothering instincts are all but lost from the world. My Bourbon Reds and I had come through hard times together, and I was still rooting for them. They had grown up handsome and strong, disease free, good meat producers, efficient pasture foragers.

  I found myself deeply invested in the next step: I wanted them to make it to the next generation on their own. Natural Childbirth or Bust. All my eggs were in one basket now. If they dropped it, we’d have pumpkin soup next Thanksgiving.

  * * *

  Taking Local On the Road

  BY CAMILLE

  I have a confession to make. Five months into my family’s year of devoted local eating, I moved out. Not because the hours of canning tomatoes in early August drove me insane or because I was overcome by insatiable cravings for tropical fruit. I just went to college. It was a challenging life, getting through chemistry and calculus while adjusting to a whole new place, and the limited dining options I had as a student living on campus didn’t help. I suppose I could have hoed up a personal vegetable patch on the quad or filled my dorm room with potted tomato and zucchini plants, but then people would really have made fun of me for being from Appalachia. Instead, I ate lettu
ce and cucumbers in January just like all the other kids.

  Living away from home, talking with my family over the phone, gave me some perspective. Not having fresh produce at my disposal made me realize how good it is. I also noticed that how I think about food is pretty unusual among my peers. When I perused the salad bar at my dining hall most evenings, grimly surveying the mealy, pinkish tomatoes and paperlike iceberg lettuce, I could pick out what probably came from South America or New Zealand. I always kept this information to myself (because who really cares when there are basketball games and frat parties to talk about?), but I couldn’t help noticing it.

  I suppose my generation is farther removed from food production than any other, just one more step down the path of the American food industry. More than our parents, we rely on foods that come out of shiny wrappers instead of peels or skins. It still surprises a girl like me, who actually lives on a real farm with real animals and stuff growing out of the ground, that so many young adults couldn’t guess where their food comes from, or when it’s in season where they live. It’s not that my rising generation is unintelligent or unworldly—my classmates are some of the smartest, most cultured people I know. But information about food and farming is not very available. Most of the people I know have never seen a working farm, or had any reason to do so. Living among people my age from various cities across the United States made me realize I actually know a lot about food production, and I don’t take that for granted.

  I also won’t forget to appreciate how much better local food tastes. Next to getting a good night’s sleep on a comfortable mattress, cooking good food became my main motivation for coming home from school to visit. Of course seeing my family was nice, but priorities are priorities, right? It was great after weeks of dorm life to eat eggs with deep golden yolks, and greens that still had their flavor and crunch. I loved being able to look at a table full of food and know where every vegetable was grown, where the meat lived when it was still a breathing animal.

  During my first year of college I found two campus eateries that use organic, locally grown produce in their meals, and one that consistently uses free-range meat. For the most part, these vendors did not widely advertise the fact that they were participating in the local food economy. I only found out because I cared, and then tried to buy most of my food from those places.

  My generation, I know, has the reputation of sticking iPods in our ears and declining to care about what might happen in ten years, or even next week. We can’t yet afford hybrid vehicles or solar homes. But we do care about a lot of things, including what we eat. Food is something real. Living on the land that has grown my food gives me a sense of security I’m lucky to have. Feeling safe isn’t so easy for people my age, who face odious threats like global warming, overpopulation, and chemical warfare in our future. But even as the world runs out of fuel and the ice caps melt, I will know the real sources of my sustenance. My college education may or may not land me a good job down the road, but my farm education will serve me. The choices I make now about my food will influence the rest of my life. If a lot of us felt this way, and started thinking carefully about our consumption habits just one meal at a time, we could affect the future of our planet. No matter how grave the predictions I hear about the future, for my peers and me, that’s a fact that gives me hope.

  * * *

  20 • TIME BEGINS

  Years ago, when Lily was not quite four, we were spending one of those perfect mother-daughter mornings in the flower garden: I planted pansies while she helped by picking up the bugs for closer looks, and not eating them at all. Three is a great age. She was asking a lot of questions about creature life, I remember, because that was the day she first worked up to the Big Question. I don’t mean sex, that’s easy. She wanted to know where everything comes from: beetles, plants, us. “How did dinosaurs get on the earth, and why did they go away?” was her reasonable starting point.

  How lovely it might be to invoke for my child in just one or two quotes the inexplicable Mystery. But I went to graduate school in evolutionary biology, which kind of obligates me to go into the details. Lily and I talked about the millions and millions of years, the seaweeds and jellyfish and rabbits. I explained how most creatures have many children (some have thousands!) with lots of small differences between them. These specialties—things like quick hiding or slow, picky eating or just shoveling everything in—can make a difference in whether the baby lives to be a grown-up. The ones that survive will have children more like themselves. And so on. The group slowly changes.

  I’ve always thought of this as a fine creation story, a sort of quantifiable miracle, and was pleased to think I’d rendered such a complex subject comprehensible to a toddler. She sat among the flowers, pondering it. At length she asked, “Mama, did you get born, or are you one of the ones that evolved from the tree primates?”

  I’m not eight million years old. But I am old enough to know I should never, ever, trust I’ve explained anything perfectly. Some part of the audience will always remain at large, confused or plain unconvinced. As I wind up this account, I’m weighing that. Is it possible to explain the year we had? I can tell you we came to think of ourselves, in the best way, as a family of animals living in our habitat. Does that reveal the meaning of our passage? Does it explain how we’re different now, even though we look the same? We are made of different stuff, with new connections to our place. We have a new relationship with the weather. So what, and who cares?

  All stories, they say, begin in one of two ways: “A stranger came to town,” or else, “I set out upon a journey.” The rest is all just metaphor and simile. Your high school English teacher was right. In Moby-Dick, you’ll know if you were half awake, the whale was not just an aquatic mammal. In our case, the heirloom turkeys are not just large birds but symbols of a precarious hold on a vanishing honesty. The chickens are secondary protagonists, the tomatoes are allegorical. The zucchini may be just zucchini.

  We set out upon a journey. It seemed so ordinary on the face of things, to try to do what nearly all people used to do without a second thought. But the trip surprised us many times, because of all the ways a landscape can enter one’s physical being. Like most of the other top-heavy hominids walking around in shoes, failing to notice the forest for the mashed trees reincarnated as our newspapers and such, I’d nearly forgotten the truest of all truths: we are what we eat.

  As our edible calendar approached its arbitrary conclusion, we were more than normally conscious of how everything starts over in the springtime. All the milestones that had nudged us toward the start of our locavore year began to wink at us again. Our seedlings came up indoors. The mud-ice melted, and the spicebushes in the lane covered themselves with tiny yellow pompoms of flower. The tranquils bloomed. On April 3, the secretive asparagus began to nose up from its bed.

  What were we doing when the day finally came? Standing by our empty chest freezer at midnight, gnawing our last frozen brick of sliced squash, watching the clock tick down the seconds till we could run out and buy Moon Pies? No. I’m sorry, but the truth is so undramatic, I can’t even find “the day” in my journal.

  The best I can do is recall a moment when I understood I had kept some promise to myself, having to do with learning to see the world differently. It was a day in early April when three little trees in our yard were covered with bloom—dark pink peach blossoms, pale pink plum, and white pear, filling the space like a Japanese watercolor. The air smelled spicy; the brown pasture had turned brilliant green. From where I stood on the front porch I could see my white-winged turkeys moving slowly through that emerald sea, nibbling as they went. I pictured how it would be in another month when the grass shot up knee-deep. I was struck, then, with a vivid fantasy of my family being in the turkeys’ place, imagining what a thrill it would be to wander chest-deep in one’s dinner as an ordinary routine. I mean to say I pictured us wading through piles of salad greens, breast-stroking into things like tomatoes, basil, and mozza
rella.

  I snapped out of it, recognizing this was not a very normal daydream. This was along the lines my astute children would diagnose as wackadoo. I took myself to be a woman changed by experience.

  But I’d noticed the kids had changed too. One day at the farmer’s market a vendor had warned us there might be some earworms in the corn because it was unsprayed. He pointed out a big one wriggling in the silks of one of the ears in our bag, and reached in to pluck it off. Lily politely held out her hand: that was our worm, we’d paid for it. She would take that protein to her chickens, and in time it would be eggs. Camille used similar logic to console me after my turkeys raided the garden and took some of the nicest tomatoes. “Mom,” she said, “you’ll eat them eventually.” And I did.

  It wasn’t just our family, either, that had changed in a year. Food was now very much a subject of public conversation—not recipes, but issues. When we’d first dreamed up our project, we’d expected our hardest task would be to explain in the most basic terms what we were doing, and why on earth we’d bother. Now our local newspaper and national ones frequently had local-food feature stories on the same day. Every state had it going on, including Arizona, the food scene we feared we had left for dead. Alaska was experiencing a farmers’ market boom, with the “Alaska Grown” logo showing up on cloth shopping bags all over Anchorage. Tod Murphy’s Farmers Diner, in order to accommodate more diners, had relocated south to Quechee Village, Vermont (near Hanover, NH). Other like-minded eateries now lay in the path of many a road trip. Hundreds of people were signing up online and reporting on their “Locavore Month” experiences. We had undertaken a life change partly as a reaction against living in a snappily-named-diet culture; now this lifestyle had its own snappy diet name: “The 100-Mile Diet Challenge!” What a shock. We were trendy.