Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

by Barbara Kingsolver

  As further proof that the movement had gained significance, local eating now had some official opposition. The standard criticisms of local food as Quixotic and elitist seemed to get louder, as more and more of us found it affordable and utterly doable. The Christian Science Monitor even ran a story on how so much local focus could breed “unhealthy provincialism.” John Clark, a development specialist for (where else) the World Bank, argued that “what are sweatshop jobs for us may be a dream job” for someone else—presumably meaning those folks who earn a few dreamy bucks a day from Dole, Kraft, Unilever, or Archer Daniel Midlands—“but all that goes out the window if we only buy local.” He expressed concern that local-food bias would lead to energy waste, as rabidly provincial consumers drove farmers in icy climes to grow bananas in hothouses.

  That’s some creative disapproval, all right—a sure sign the local-food movement was getting worrisome to food industrialists who had heretofore controlled consumer choices so handily, even when they damaged our kids’ health and our neighborhoods. Shoppers were starting to show some backbone, clearly shifting certain preferences about what foods they purchased, and from where. An estimated 3 percent of the national supply of fresh produce had moved directly from farmers to customers that year.

  The “why bother” part of the equation was also becoming obvious to more people. Global climate change had gone, in one year, from unmentionable to cover story. “The end of the oil economy” was now being discussed by some politicians and many economists, not just tree huggers and Idaho survivalists. We were starting to get it.

  But it’s also true what the strategists say about hearts and minds—you have to win them both. We will change our ways significantly as a nation not when some laws tell us we have to (remember Prohibition?), but when we want to. During my family’s year of conscious food choices, the most important things we’d learned were all about that: the wanting to. Our fretful minds had started us on a project of abstinence from industrial food, but we finished it with our hearts. We were not counting down the days until the end, because we didn’t want to go back.

  A few days after my momentary chest-deep-in-food fantasy, we had dinner with our friends Sylvain and Cynthia. Sylvain grew up in the Loire Valley, where local food is edible patriotism, and I sensed a kindred spirit from the way he celebrated every bite of our salad, inhaling the spice of the cut radishes and arugula. He told us that in India it’s sometimes considered a purification ritual to go home and spend a year eating everything from one place—ideally, even to grow it yourself. I liked this name for what we had done: a purification ritual, to cultivate health and gratitude. It sounds so much better than wackadoo.

  The Blind Leading the Blind

  * * *

  Critics of local food suggest that it’s naive or elitist, whereas industrial agriculture is for everybody: it’s what’s for dinner, all about feeding the world. “Genetically modified, industrially produced monocultural corn,” wrote Steven Shapin in the New Yorker, “is what feeds the victims of an African famine, not the gorgeous organic technicolor Swiss chard from your local farmers’ market.”

  The big guys have so completely taken over the rules of the game, it’s hard to see how food systems really work, but this criticism hits the nail right on the pointy end: it’s perfectly backward. One of industrial agriculture’s latest feed-the-hungry schemes offers a good example of why that’s so. Exhibit A: “golden rice.” It’s a genetically modified variety of rice that contains beta-carotene in the kernel. (All other parts of the rice plant already contain it, but not the grain after it is milled.) The developers of this biotechnology say they will donate the seeds—with some strings attached—to Third World farmers. It’s an important public relations point because the human body converts beta-carotene to vitamin A; a deficiency of that vitamin affects millions of children, especially in Asia, causing half a million of them every year to go blind. GM rice is the food industry’s proposed solution.

  But most of the world’s malnourished children live in countries that already produce surplus food. We have no reason to believe they would have better access to this special new grain. Golden rice is one more attempt at a monoculture solution to nutritional problems that have been caused by monocultures and disappearing diversity. In India alone, farmers have traditionally grown over 200 types of greens, and gathered many more wild ones from the countryside. Every single one is a good source of beta-carotene. So are fruits and vegetables. Further, vitamin A delivered in a rice kernel may not even help a malnourished child, because it can’t be absorbed well in isolation from other nutrients. Throwing more rice at the problem of disappearing dietary diversity is a blind approach to the problem of blindness. “Naïve” might describe a person who believes agribusinesses develop their heavily patented commodity crops in order to feed the poor. (Golden rice, alone, has seventy patents on it.) Technicolor chard and its relatives growing in village gardens—that’s a solution for realists.

  * * *

  STEVEN L. HOPP

  Over the years since I first acquired children and a job, I’ve often made reference to the concern of “keeping my family fed.” I meant this in the same symbolic way I’d previously used (pre-kids, pre-respectable job) to speak of something “costing a lot of bread.” I was really talking about money. Now when I say bread, I mean bread. I find that food is not symbolic of anything so much as it is real stuff: beetroot as neighbor to my shoe, chicken as sometime companion. I once read a pioneer diary in which the Kansas wife postponed, week after week, harvesting the last hen in her barren, windy yard. “We need the food badly,” she wrote, “but I will miss the company.”

  I have never been anywhere near that lonely, but now I can relate to the relationship. When I pick apples, I miss the way they looked on the tree. Eggplants look like lightbulbs on the plant, especially the white and neon purple ones, and I observe the unplugging of their light when I toss them in the basket. My turkey hens have names now. I do know better, but couldn’t help myself.

  At the end of March, one of my turkey mothers found her calling. She sat down on the platform nest and didn’t get up again for a week. Then two, then three. This was Lolita, the would-be husband-stealer—the hen who had been first to show mating behaviors, and then to lay eggs. Now she was the first to begin sitting with dedication. We expunged “Lolita” from her record and dubbed her “Number One Mother.”

  Underneath the platform where she now sat earning that title, we fixed up two more nests to contain the overflow. Together the hens had now produced more than fifty eggs. While Number One Mother incubated about two dozen of them, Numbers Two, Three, and Four were showing vague interest in the other piles. Number Two had started to spend the nights sitting on eggs, but still had better things to do in the daytime. Three and Four were using the remaining nest the way families use a time-share condo in Florida.

  But something inside the downy breast of Number One had switched on. Once she settled in, I never saw her get up again, not even for a quick drink of water. With her head flattened against her body and a faraway look in her eyes, she gave herself over to maternity. I began bringing her handfuls of grain and cups of water that she slurped with desperation. I apologized for everything I’d said to her earlier.

  I was the free bird now, out in the sunshine as much as possible, walking into the open-armed embrace of springtime. A balmy precipitation of cherry petals swirled around us as we did our garden chores. The ruddy fiddleheads of peony leaves rolled up out of the ground. The birthday garden made up of gift plants I’d received last year now surprised me like a series of unexpected phone calls: the irises bloomed; the blue fountain grass poured over the rocks; I found the yellow lady’s slipper blossoms when I was weeding under the maple. One friend had given me fifty tulip bulbs, one for each of my years, which we planted in a long trail down the driveway. Now they were popping up with flaming red heads on slender stalks like candles on a birthday cake. The groundhog that dug up some bulbs over the wint
er had taken a few years off. I would try to remain grateful to the groundhog later on, when he was eating my beans.

  Spring is made of solid, fourteen-karat gratitude, the reward for the long wait. Every religious tradition from the northern hemisphere honors some form of April hallelujah, for this is the season of exquisite redemption, a slam-bang return to joy after a season of cold second thoughts. Our personal hallelujah was the return of good, fresh food. Nobody in our household was dying for a Moon Pie, but we’d missed crisp things, more than we’d realized. Starting the cycle again was a heady prospect: cutting asparagus, hunting morels, harvesting tender spinach and chard. We’d made it.

  Did our year go the way we’d expected? It’s hard to say. We weren’t thinking every minute about food, as our family life was occupied front and center by so many other things. Devastating illnesses had darkened several doors in our close family. We’d sent a daughter off to college and missed her company, and her cooking. If our special way of eating had seemed imposing at first, gradually it was just dinner, the spontaneous background of family time as we met our fortunes one day, one phone call, one hospital visit, wedding, funeral, spelling bee, and birthday party at a time. It caused us to take more notice of food traditions of all kinds—the candy-driven school discipline program, the overwhelming brace of covered dishes that attend a death in the family. But in the main, our banana-free life was now just our life. So much so, in fact, I sometimes found myself a bit startled to run across things like bananas in other people’s kitchens—like discovering a pair of Manolo Blahnik sandals in the lettuce bed. Very nice I’m sure, just a little bit extravagant for our kind.

  We pressed ourselves to pronounce some verdicts on our year. Our planning and putting-by for the winter had passed muster, as we still had pesto and vegetables in our freezer to last comfortably till the abundances of June. We’d overplanted squash, could have used more garlic, but had enough of everything to stay happy. The Web site of the local-eating Vancouver couple said they’d ended their year fifteen pounds lighter (despite what they described as “a lot of potatoes”), whereas we all weighed out of the year right about where we’d weighed in, and hoped to remain—except for Lily, who had gained twelve pounds and grown nearly five inches. Obviously we never went hungry, and you can’t raise that much good kid on potatoes alone. The Canadians had been purists, though, and really we weren’t; we’d maintained those emergency rations of mac-and-cheese. (And anyone giving up coffee gets a medal we weren’t even in the running for.) But frankly, any year in which no high-fructose corn syrup crosses my threshold is pure enough for me.

  Our plan to make everything from scratch had pushed us into a lot of great learning experiences. In some cases, what we learned was that it was too much trouble for everyday: homemade pasta really is better, but we will always buy it most of the time, and save the big pasta-cranking events for dinner parties. Hard cheeses are hard. I never did try the French-class mayonnaise recipe. I’d also imagined at some irrational moment that I would learn to make apple cider and vinegar, but happily submitted to realism when I located professionals nearby doing these things really well. On the other hand, making our daily bread, soft cheeses, and yogurt had become so routine we now prepared them in minutes, without a recipe.

  Altered routines were really the heart of what we’d gained. We’d learned that many aisles of our supermarket offered us nothing local, so we didn’t even push our carts down those: frozen foods, canned goods, soft drinks (yes, that’s a whole aisle). Just grab the Virginia dairy products and organic flour and get out, was our motto, before you start coveting thy neighbor’s goods. A person can completely forget about lemons and kiwis once the near occasion is removed.

  As successful as our sleuthing into local markets had been, we never did find good local wheat products, or seafood. I was definitely looking forward to some nonlocal splurges in the coming months: wild-caught Alaskan salmon and bay scallops and portobellos, hooray. In moderation, of course. I had a much better sense of my options now and could try for balance, buying one bottle of Virginia wine, for example, for every import.

  The biggest shock of our year came when we added up the tab. We’d fed ourselves, organically and pretty splendidly we thought, on about fifty cents per family member, per meal—probably less than I spent in the years when I qualified for food stamps. Of course, I now had the luxury of land for growing food to supplement our purchases. But it wasn’t a lot of land: 3,524 square feet of tilled beds gave us all our produce—that’s a forty-by-twenty-two-foot spread, per person. (It felt a lot bigger when we were weeding it.) We appreciate our farm’s wooded mountainsides for hiking and the rare morel foray—and for our household water supply—but in the main, one doesn’t eat a nature preserve. Adding up the land occupied by our fruit trees, berry bushes, and the pasture grazed by our poultry brings our land-use total for nutritional support to about a quarter acre—still a modest allotment. Our main off-farm purchases for the year were organic grain for animal feed, and the 300 pounds of flour required for our daily bread. To put this in perspective, a good wheat field yields 1,600 pounds of flour per acre. In total, for our grain and flour, pastured meats and goods from the farmers’ market, and our own produce, our family’s food footprint for the year was probably around one acre.

  By contrast, current nutritional consumption in the U.S. requires an average of 1.2 cultivated acres for every citizen—4.8 acres for a family of four. (Among other things, it takes space to grow corn syrup for that hypothetical family’s 219 gallons of soda.) These estimates become more meaningful when placed next to another prediction: in 2050, the amount of U.S. farmland available per citizen will be only 0.6 acres. By the numbers, the hypothetical family has change in the cards. By any measure, ours had discovered a way of eating that was more resourceful than I ever could have predicted.

  In the coming year, I decided, I would plant fewer tomatoes, and more flowers. If we didn’t have quite such a big garden, if we took a vacation to the beach this summer, we’d do that thanks to our friends at the farmers’ market. The point of being dedicated locavores for some prescribed length of time, I now understand, is to internalize a trust in one’s own foodshed. It’s natural to get panicky right off the bat, freaking out about January and salad, thinking we could never ever do it. But we did. Without rationing, skipping a meal, buying a corn-fed Midwesternburger or breaking our vows of exclusivity with local produce, we lived inside our own territory for one good year of food life.

  “I can’t exactly explain what we’re looking for,” I told our guests, feeling like a perfectly idiotic guide. “Your eye kind of has to learn for itself.”

  We were back on Old Charley’s Lot, scanning the dry-leaf-colored ground for dry-leaf-colored mushrooms. Steven found the first patch, a trio tilted at coy angles like garden gnomes. We all stood staring, trying to fix our vision. The color, the shape, the size, everything about a morel resembles a curled leaf lying on the ground among a million of its kind. Even so, the brain perceives, dimly at first and then, after practice, with a weirdly trenchant efficiency. You spot them before you know you’ve seen them.

  This was the original human vocation: finding food on the ground. We’re wired for it. It’s hard to stop, too. Our friends Joan and Jesse had traveled a long way that day, and their idea of the perfect host might not be a Scoutmaster type who makes you climb all over a slick, pathless mountainside with cat briars ripping your legs. But they didn’t complain, even as rain began to spit on our jackets and we climbed through another maze of wild grapevines and mossy logs. “We could go back now,” I kept saying. They insisted we keep looking.

  After the first half hour we grew quiet, concentrating on the ground, giving each other space for our own finds. It was a rare sort of afternoon. The wood thrushes and warblers, normally quiet once the sun gets a good foothold, kept blurting out occasional pieces of song, tricked into a morning mood by the cool, sunless sky. Pileated woodpeckers pitched ideas to one another in t
heir secret talking-drum language. These giant, flamboyant woodpeckers are plentiful in our woods. We all took note of their presence, and were drawn out of our silence to comment on the remarkable news about their even more gigantic first cousins, the ivory-billed woodpeckers. These magnificent creatures, the “Lord God Birds” as they used to be called in the South, had been presumed extinct for half a century. Now a reputable research team had made an unbelievable but well-documented announcement. Ivorybills were still alive, deep in a swamp in Arkansas. Lord God.

  Was it true? A mistake or a hoax? Was it just one bird, or a few, maybe even enough for the species to survive? These were still open questions, but they were headliner questions, inspiring chat rooms and T-shirts and a whole new tourist industry in swampy Arkansas. People who never gave a hoot about birds before cared about this one. It was a miracle, capturing our hopes. We so want to believe it’s possible to come back from our saddest mistakes, and have another chance.

  “How do you encourage people to keep their hope,” Joan asked, “but not their complacency?” She was deeply involved that spring in producing a film about global climate change, and preoccupied with striking this balance. The truth is so horrific: we are marching ourselves to the maw of our own extinction. An audience that doesn’t really get that will amble out of the theater unmoved, go home and change nothing. But an audience that does get it may be so terrified they’ll feel doomed already. They might walk out looking paler, but still do nothing. How is it possible to inspire an appropriately repentant stance toward a planet that is really, really upset?