Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

by Barbara Kingsolver

The average food item on a U.S. grocery shelf has traveled farther than most families go on their annual vacations. True fact. Fossil fuels were consumed for the food’s transport, refrigeration, and processing, with the obvious environmental consequences.

If every U.S. citizen ate just one meal a week (any meal) composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce, we would reduce our country’s oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels of oil every week.

It is not my intention here to lionize country wisdom over city ambition. I only submit that the children of farmers are likely to know where food comes from, and that the rest of us might do well to pay attention.

nation. North American children begin their school year around Labor Day and finish at the beginning of June with no idea that this arrangement was devised to free up children’s labor when it was needed on the farm.

The baby boom psyche embraces a powerful presumption that education is a key to moving away from manual labor, and dirt—two undeniable ingredients of farming. It’s good enough for us that somebody, somewhere, knows food production well enough to serve the rest of us with all we need to eat, each day of our lives.

mercy. Obesity is generally viewed as a failure of personal resolve, with no acknowledgment of the genuine conspiracy in this historical scheme. People actually did sit in strategy meetings discussing ways to get all those surplus calories into people who neither needed nor wished to consume them.

Food cultures concentrate a population’s collective wisdom about the plants and animals that grow in a place, and the complex ways of rendering them tasty.

A more optimistic view might be this: these sets of mandates captivate us because we’re looking hard for a food culture of our own.

What the fad diets don’t offer, though, is any sense of national and biological integrity. A food culture is not something that gets sold to people. It arises out of a place, a soil, a climate, a history, a temperament, a collective sense of belonging.

We’re a nation with an eating disorder, and we know it. The multiple maladies caused by bad eating are taking a dire toll on our health—most tragically for our kids, who are predicted to be this country’s first generation to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents.

A majority of North Americans do understand, at some level, that our food choices are politically charged, affecting arenas from rural culture to international oil cartels and global climate change.

The asparagus plant’s life history sets it apart, giving it a special edge as the year’s first major edible.

But there’s a simpler reason to pass up off-season asparagus: it’s inferior. Respecting the dignity of a spectacular food means enjoying it at its best. Europeans celebrate the short season of abundant asparagus as a form of holiday.

spears. The French make a similar party out of the release of each year’s Beaujolais; the Italians crawl over their woods like harvester ants in the autumn mushroom season, and go gaga over the summer’s first tomato. Waiting for foods to come into season means tasting them when they’re good, but waiting is also part of most value equations. Treating foods this way can help move “eating” in the consumer’s mind from the Routine Maintenance Department over to the Division of Recreation.

The main barrier standing between ourselves and a local-food culture is not price, but attitude.

Waiting for the quality experience seems to be the constitutional article that has slipped from American food

custom. If we mean to reclaim it, asparagus seems like a place to start. And if the object of our delayed gratification is a suspected aphrodisiac? That’s the sublime paradox of a food culture: restraint equals indulgence.

April is the cruelest month, T. S. Eliot wrote, by which I think he meant (among other things) that springtime makes people crazy. We expect too much, the world burgeons with promises it can’t keep, all passion is really a setup, and we’re doomed to get our hearts broken yet again. I agree, and would further add: Who cares?

Modern U.S. consumers now get to taste less than 1 percent of the vegetable varieties that were grown here a century ago.

According to Indian crop ecologist Vandana Shiva, humans have eaten some 80,000 plant species in our history. After recent precipitous changes, three-quarters of all human food now comes from just eight species, with the field quickly narrowing down to genetically modified corn, soy, and canola.

pandas enjoy celebrity status on the endangered-species list (dubious though such fame may be), food crops are the forgotten commoners. We’re losing them as fast as we’re losing rain forests. An enormous factor in this loss has been the new idea of plant varieties as patentable properties, rather than God’s gifts to humanity or whatever the arrangement was previously felt to be, for all of prior history.

Six companies—Monsanto, Syngenta, DuPont, Mitsui, Aventis, and Dow—now control 98 percent of the world’s seed sales.

If you guessed Monsanto controls sales of both the resistant seed and the Roundup, give yourself a star. If you think you’d never eat such stuff, you’re probably wrong. GM plants are virtually everywhere in the U.S. food chain, but don’t have to be labeled, and aren’t. Industry lobbyists intend to keep it that way.

“These resources stand between us and catastrophic starvation on a scale we cannot imagine. . . . The line between abundance and disaster is becoming thinner and thinner.”

Evolutionary ecologists call this the Red Queen principle (named in 1973 by Leigh Van Valen), after the Red Queen in Through the Looking Glass, who observed to Alice: “In this place it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place.” Both predator and prey must continually change or go extinct.

We now depend similarly on a few corn and soybean strains for the majority of calories (both animal and vegetable) eaten by U.S. citizens. Our addiction to just two crops has made us the fattest people who’ve ever lived, dining just a few pathogens away from famine.

Woe is us, we overfed, undernourished U.S. citizens—we are eating poorly for so very many reasons. A profit-driven, mechanized food industry has narrowed down our variety and overproduced corn and soybeans. But we let other vegetables drop from the menu without putting up much of a fight.

Bizarre as it seems, we’ve accepted a tradeoff that amounts to: “Give me every vegetable in every season, even if it tastes like a cardboard picture of its former self.”

The Seed Savers’ Exchange, headquartered on a farm in Decorah, Iowa, was founded by Diane and Kent Whealy after Diane’s grandfather left her the seeds of a pink tomato that his parents brought from Bavaria in the 1870s. Seeds are living units, not museum pieces; in jars on a shelf their viability declines with age. Diane and Kent thought it seemed wise to move seed collections into real gardens.

Seed Savers’ Yearbook

Native Seeds/SEARCH is a similar network focused on Native American crops; the North American Fruit Explorers promotes heirloom fruit and nut tree collections.

The world’s largest and best known save-the-endangered-foods organization is Slow Food International. Founded in Italy in 1986, the organization states that its aim is “to protect the pleasures of the table from the homogenization of modern fast food and life.”

Its Ark of Taste initiatives catalog and publicize forgotten foods—a Greek fava bean grown only on the island of Santorini, for instance, or the last indigenous breed of Irish cattle.

You can’t save the whales by eating whales, but paradoxically, you can help save rare, domesticated foods by eating them. They’re kept alive by gardeners who have a taste for them, and farmers who know they’ll be able to sell them. The consumer becomes a link in this conservation chain by seeking out the places where heirloom vegetables are sold, taking them home, whacking them up with knives, and learning to incorporate their exceptional tastes into personal and family expectations. Many

If potatoes can surprise some part of their audience by growing leaves, it may not have occurred to everyone that lettuce has a flower part. It does, they all do. Virtually all nonanimal foods we eat come from flowering plants.

So goes the year. First the leaves: spinach, kale, lettuce, and chard (here, that’s April and May). Then more mature heads of leaves and flower heads: cabbage, romaine,

broccoli, and cauliflower (May–June). Then tender young fruit-set: snow peas, baby squash, cucumbers (June), followed by green beans, green peppers, and small tomatoes (July). Then more mature, colorfully ripened fruits: beefsteak tomatoes, eggplants, red and yellow peppers (late July–August). Then the large, hard-shelled fruits with developed seeds inside: cantaloupes, honeydews, watermelons, pumpkins, winter squash (August–September). Last come the root crops, and so ends the produce parade.

Well-heeled North American epicures are likely to gather around a table where whole continents collide discreetly on a white tablecloth: New Zealand lamb with Italian porcinis, Peruvian asparagus, and a hearty French Bordeaux. The date on the calendar is utterly irrelevant.

I’ve enjoyed my share of such meals, but I’m beginning at least to notice when I’m consuming the United Nations of edible plants and animals all in one seating. (Or the WTO, is more like it.)

So it is. And I don’t wish to be ungracious, but we get it at a price. Most of that is not measured in money, but in untallied debts that will be paid by our children in the currency of extinctions, economic unravelings, and global climate change.

Developed nations promote domestic overproduction of commodity crops that are sold on the international market at well below market price, undermining the fragile economies of developing countries.

Global trade deals negotiated by the World Trade Organization and World Bank allow corporations to shop for food from countries with the poorest environmental, safety, and labor conditions. While passing bargains on to consumers, this pits farmers in one country against those in another, in a downward wage spiral. Product quality is somewhat irrelevant.

Most people no longer believe that buying sneakers made in Asian sweatshops is a kindness to those child laborers. Farming is similar. In every country on earth, the most humane scenario for farmers is likely to be feeding those who live nearby—if international markets would allow them to do

But this one takes the cake:

the manner in which we’re allowed to steal from future generations, while commanding them not to do that to us, and rolling our eyes at anyone who is tediously PC enough to point this out. The conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners.

The business of importing foods across great distances is not, by its nature, a boon to Third World farmers, but it’s very good business for oil companies.

Slow Food International has done a good job of putting a smile on this eating style, rather than a pious frown, even while sticking to the quixotic agenda of fighting overcentralized agribusiness.

The world’s most beautiful tomato, if it can’t get into a shopper’s basket in less than five days, is worth exactly nothing. Markets and infrastructure depend on consumers who will at least occasionally choose locally grown foods, and pay more than rock-bottom prices.

genes. But farming at its best optimizes both economic and environmental health at the same time.

The people of southern Appalachia have a long folk tradition of using our woodlands creatively and knowing them intimately. The most caricatured livelihood, of course, is the moonshine still hidden deep in the hollow, but that is not so much about the woodlands as the farms; whiskey was once the most practical way to store, transport, and add value to the small corn crops that were grown here.