Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

by Barbara Kingsolver

I’ve heard them called Molly Mooch, sponge mushrooms, haystacks, dryland fish, and snakeheads. What everyone agrees on is that they’re delicious.

We know that only because our friends who grew up on this farm showed us where to look. This is the kind of knowledge that gets lost if people have to leave their land. Farmers aren’t just picturesque technicians. They are memory banks, human symbionts with their ground.

Mushroom ethics mandate the mesh collecting bag, so the spores can scatter as you carry home your loot.

We put our Mollies in a bowl of salt water to soak briefly prior to cooking. I’m not sure why, but our mushroom-hunting friends say to do this with morels, and I am not one to argue with wild mushroomers who claim the distinction of being still alive.

When we signed her in at the principal’s office, the secretary needed a reason for Lily’s tardiness. Lily threw back her shoulders and announced, “I had to start my own chicken business this morning.” The secretary said without blinking, “Oh, okay, farming,” and entered the code for “Excused, Agriculture.” Just another day at our elementary school, where education comes in many boxes.

The American Livestock Breeds Conservancy keeps track of rare varieties of turkeys, chickens, ducks, sheep, goats, pigs, and cattle that were well known to farmers a century ago, but whose numbers have declined to insignificance in the modern market.

heritage breeds tend to retain more of their wild ancestors’ sense about foraging, predator avoidance, and reproduction—traits that suit them for life in the pasture and barnyard rather than a crowded, windowless metal house.

Slow Food has employed the paradox of saving rare breeds by getting more people to eat them, and that’s exactly what happened in its 2003 Ark of Taste turkey project. So many people signed up in the spring for heirloom Thanksgiving turkeys instead of the standard Butterball, an unprecedented number of U.S. farmers were called upon to raise them. The demand has continued.

On Mother’s Day, in keeping with local tradition, we gave out tomato plants. Elsewhere this may be the genteel fête of hothouse orchids, but here the holiday’s most important botanical connection is with tomatoes.

Everything we grow has its reason, usually practical but sometimes eccentric, like the Dolly Partons given us by an elderly seed-saving friend. (“What do the tomatoes look like?” I asked. She cupped her hands around two enormous imaginary orbs and mugged, “Do you have to ask?”)

On weekends we started at daybreak and finished after dusk, aching and hungry from the work of making food. Labors like this help a person appreciate why good food costs what it does. It ought to cost more.

Appalachian ramp hoedowns in April, harvest festivals wherever and whenever a growing season ends. That’s why Canadian Thanksgiving comes six weeks before ours: so does Canadian winter.

thought about people I knew who right at that moment might be plucking chickens, picking strawberries and lettuce, just for us. I felt grateful to the people involved, and the animals also. I don’t say this facetiously. I sent my thanks across the county, like any sensible person saying grace before a meal.

belting out backup harmonies with my cousin Linda to “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” by the Rolling Stones. The over-fifty crowd stayed on its feet until two in the morning. You get what you need.

Camille made the call, and it was inspired: a plant. The tiniest posy, anything would serve. And truthfully, while we’d put prodigious efforts into our vegetable garden and orchards, our front yard lay sorry and neglected. Anything people might bring to set into that ground would improve it. Thus began the plan for my half-century Birthday Garden: higgledy-piggledy, florescent and spontaneous, like friendship itself.

Over the last decade our country has lost an average of 300 farms a week.

Large or small, each of those was the life’s work of a real person or family, people who built their lives around a promise and watched it break.

Diversified food-producing farms on the outskirts of cities are actually the fastest-growing sector of U.S. agriculture. The small farm is at the moment very busy thinking its way out of a box, working like mad to protect the goodness and food security of a largely ungrateful nation.

A common complaint about organic and local foods is that they’re more expensive than “conventional” (industrially grown) foods. Most consumers don’t realize how much we’re already paying for the conventional foods, before we even get to the supermarket. Our tax dollars subsidize the petroleum used in growing, processing, and shipping these products. We also pay direct subsidies to the large-scale, chemical-dependent brand of farming. And we’re being forced to pay more each year for the environmental and health costs of that method of food production.

Organic practices build rather than deplete the soil, using manure and cover crops. They eliminate pesticides and herbicides, instead using

They maintain and apply knowledge of many different crops. All this requires extra time and labor.

But the main difference is that organic growers aren’t forcing us to pay expenses they’ve shifted into other domains, such as environmental and health damage. As they’re allowed to play a larger role in the U.S. agricultural economy, our subsidy costs to industrial agricultur...

Farmers like Amy generally agree that organic standards are a good thing on principle. When consumers purchase food at a distance from where it’s grown, certification lets them know it was grown in conditions that are clearly codified and enforced.

The larger the corporation, the more distant its motives are apt to be from the original spirit of organic farming—and the farther the products will likely be shipped to buyers who will smile at the happy farm picture on the package, and never be the wiser. Because organic farming is labor-intensive,

holding prices down has even led some large-scale organic growers into direct conflict with OSHA and the United Farm Workers. Just

least, but often live with their families in work-camp towns where pesticide drift is as common as poverty. The

Increasingly, small-scale food farmers like Amy feel corporate organics may be betraying that confidence, extracting too much in the short term from their biotic and human communities, stealing the heart of a movement.

The best and only defense, for both growers and the consumers who care, is a commitment to more local food economies.

But “locally grown” is a denomination whose meaning is incorruptible. Sparing the transportation fuel, packaging, and unhealthy additives is a compelling part of the story, but the plot goes well beyond that.

It involves farmers with first names, who show up week after week.

Local is farmers growing trust.

Eternal is the right frame of mind. “When I’m out there cultivating the corn with a good team in the quiet of the afternoon, watching the birds in the hedgerows, oh my goodness, I could just keep going all day. Kids from the city come out here and ask, ‘What do you do for fun around here?’ I tell them, ‘I cultivate.’”

A lifetime is what I’m after.

I’m discussing dinnertime, the cornerstone of our family’s mental health.

75 percent of my crucial parenting effort has taken place during or surrounding the time our family convenes for our evening meal.

A survey of National Merit scholars—exceptionally successful eighteen-year-olds crossing all lines of ethnicity, gender, geography, and class—turned up a common thread in their lives: the habit of sitting down to a family dinner table. It’s not just the food making them brilliant. It’s probably the parents—their car...

This link between economic success and nutritional failure has become so widespread, it has a name: the nutrition transition.

some of our tired and poorest live in neighborhoods where groceries are sold only in gas station mini-marts. Food stamp allowances are in some cases as low as one dollar a person per meal, which will buy beans and rice with nothing thrown in.

Finally, cooking is good citizenship. It’s the only way to get serious about putting locally raised foods into your diet, which keeps farmlands healthy and grocery money in the neighborhood.

When I ponder the question of why Americans eat so much bad food on purpose, this is my best guess: alimentary alienation. We can’t feel how or why it hurts.

If you ask me, that’s reason enough to keep a kitchen at the center of a family’s life, as a place to understand favorite foods as processes, not just products. It’s the prime motivation behind our vegetable garden, our regular baking of bread, and other experiments that ultimately become household routines.

What kind of weirdo makes cheese? It’s too hard to imagine, too homespun, too something. We’re so alienated from the creation of even ordinary things we eat or use, each one seems to need its own public relations team to calm the American subservience to hurry and bring us back around to doing a thing ourselves, at home.

the closer to home your source, the better. Reading labels in your dairy case may lead you to discover a dairy that isn’t too far away, and hasn’t ultra-pasteurized the product for long-distance travel.

If a family can put one organic choice on their shopping list, he’d said, it should be dairy. The industry says growth hormones in milk are safe; the pediatrician (and for the record, he’s not alone) said he had seen too many girls going through early puberty.

It takes imagination to see how some of these rules affect consumer safety. Many other raw food products—notably poultry from CAFOs—typically carry a much higher threat to human health in terms of pathogen load, and yet the government trusts us to render it safe in our own humble kitchens. But it’s easy to see how impossibly strict milk rules might gratify industry lobbyists, by eliminating competition from family producers.

Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’”

We’re connecting across geography and time with the artisans of Camembert, the Greek shepherds, the Mongols on the steppes who live by milking their horses—everybody who ever looked at a full-moon pot of white milk and imagined cheese. We’re recalling our best memories infused with scents, parental love, and some kind of food magically coming together in the routines of childhood.

In our house, the kitchen is the place to be. The time we spend making dinner is hugely important because it gets us together after all our separate agendas, and when we sit down to eat we have a sense that the food in front of us is special.

Buying your goods from local businesses rather than national chains generates about three times as much money for your local economy. Studies from all over the country agree on that, even while consumers keep buying at chain stores, and fretting that the downtown blocks of cute mom-and-pop venues are turning into a ghost town.

Tod Murphy’s background was farming. The greatest economic challenge he and his farming neighbors faced was finding a market for their good products. Opening this diner seemed to him like a red-blooded American kind of project.