Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

by Barbara Kingsolver

Declaration of Independence, just a good business plan. He found investors and opened the Farmers Diner, whose slogan is “Think Locally, Act Neighborly.”

“We have the illusion of consumer freedom, but we’ve sacrificed our community life for the pleasure of purchasing lots of cheap stuff. Making and moving all that stuff can be so destructive: child labor in foreign lands, acid rain in the Northeast, depleted farmland, communities where the big economic

engine is crystal meth. We often have the form of liberty, but not the substance.”

Organic farming involves a level of biotic observation more commonly associated with scientists than with farmers. David’s communion with his cornfield is part meditation and part biology. The plants, insects, birds, mammals, and microbes interact in such complicated ways, he is still surprised by new discoveries even after a lifetime spent mostly outdoors watching.

flies. The prospect of blanketing them all with toxic dust even once, let alone routinely, strikes him as self-destructive, like purposely setting fire to his crops or barn.

This is a real-world example of evolution, and whether or not it’s showing up in textbooks, it is going strong in our conventional agriculture. More than 500 species of insects and mites now resist our chemical controls, along with over 150 viruses and other plant pathogens. More than 270 of our recently developed herbicides have now become ineffective for controlling some weeds. Some 300 weed species resist all herbicides. Uh-oh, now what?

“Just try something,” David said. “Flash the headlights one time, on and off.” What happened next was surreal. After our bright flash the field went black, and then, like a wave, a million lights flashed back at us in unison.

The Amish don’t oppose technology on principle, only particular technologies they feel would change their lives for the worse. I have sympathy for this position; a good many of us, in fact, might wish we’d come around to it before so much noise got into our homes. As it was explained to me, the relationship of the Amish with their technology is to strive for what is “appropriate,” making that designation case by case.

David summarizes his position on technology in one word: boundaries. “The workhorse places a limit on the size of our farms, and the standardbred horse-drawn buggy limits the distances we travel. This is basically what we need. This is what keeps our communities healthy.” It makes perfect sense, of course, that limiting territory size can yield dividends in appreciation for what one already has, and the ability to manage it without debt.

If nobody is spritzing chemicals on the predators, all a plant can do is to toughen up by manufacturing its own disease/pest-fighting compounds. That’s why organic produce shows significantly higher levels of antioxidants than conventional—these nutritious compounds evolved in the plant not for our health, but for the plant’s.

The same antioxidants that fight diseases and pests in the plant leaf work similar magic in the human body, protecting us not so much against hornworms as against various diseases, cell aging, and tumor growth. Spending extra money on organic produce buys these extra nutrients, with added environmental benefits for the well-being of future generations (like mine!).

The agricultural concern with weeds is not aesthetic but functional.

Weedy species specialize in disturbed (i.e. newly tilled) soil, and grow so fast they kill the crops if allowed to stay, first through root competition and then by shading.

Growing food was the first activity that gave us enough prosperity to stay in one place, form complex social groups, tell our stories, and build our cities. Archaeologists

Hunter-gatherers slowly gained the skills to control and increase their food supply, learned to accumulate surplus to feed family groups through dry or cold seasons, and then settled down to build towns, cities, empires, and the like. And when centralization collapses on itself, as it inevitably does, back we go to the family farm.

The Roman Empire grew fat on the fruits of huge, corporate, slave-driven agricultural operations, to the near exclusion of any small farms by the end of the era. But when Rome crashed and burned, its urbanized citizenry scurried out to every nook and cranny of Italy’s mountains and valleys, returning once again to the work of feeding themselves and their families. They’re still doing it, famously, to this day.

Eaters must understand, how we eat determines how the world is used. They will or they won’t. And the happy grocery store music plays on.

Wendell Berry, who writes in What Are People For, “I dislike the thought that some animal has been made miserable in order to feed me. If I am going to eat meat, I want it to be from an animal that has lived a pleasant, uncrowded life outdoors, on bountiful pasture, with good water nearby and trees for shade. And I am getting almost as fussy about food plants.”

poke. The farm-liberation fantasy simply reflects a modern cultural confusion about farm animals.

But living at a remove from the actual workings of a farm, most humans no longer learn appropriate modes of thinking about animal harvest. Knowing that our family raises meat animals, many friends have told us—not judgmentally, just confessionally—“I don’t think I could kill an animal myself.” I find myself explaining: It’s not what you think. It’s nothing like putting down your dog.

We reconnect with the purpose for which these animals were bred. We dispense with all delusions about who put the live in livestock, and who must take it away.

“People in this country do everything to cheat death, it seems. Instead of being happy with each moment, they worry so much about what comes next. I think this gets transposed to animals—the preoccupation with ‘taking a life.’ My animals have all had a good life, with death as its natural end. It’s not without thought and gratitude that I slaughter my animals, it is a hard thing to do.

Bananas that cost a rain forest, refrigerator-trucked soy milk, and prewashed spinach shipped two thousand miles in plastic containers do not seem cruelty-free, in this context. A hundred different paths may lighten the world’s load of suffering. Giving up meat is one path; giving up bananas is another. The more we know about our food system, the more we are called into complex choices. It seems facile to declare one single forbidden fruit, when humans live under so many different kinds of trees.

Schlosser. In an essay titled “Food with a Face,” journalist Michael Pollan wrote: “More than any other institution, the American industrial animal farm offers a nightmarish glimpse of what Capitalism can look like in the absence of moral or regulatory constraint.

Most of the named meals I’d ever known about had butch monikers like Whopper, Monster, and Gulp. I was enchanted with the idea of a lunch named Margherita, Capricciosa, or Quattro Stagioni.

Steven’s Italian

The point of eating one course at a time, rather than mixing them all on a single loaded plate, seems to be the opportunity to concentrate one’s attention on each flavor, each perfect ingredient, one uncluttered recipe at a time.

A similar sense of necessity is driving a current worldwide growth of urban-centered food production. In developing countries where numbers of urban poor are growing, spontaneous gardening on available land is providing substantial food: In Shanghai over 600,000 garden acres are tucked into the margins of the city. In Moscow, two-thirds of families grow food. In Havana, Cuba, over 80 percent of produce consumed in the city comes from urban gardens.

communities. Urban areas cover 2 percent of the earth’s surface but consume 75 percent of its resources.

The longer I think about a food industry organized around an animal that cannot reproduce itself without technical assistance, the more I mistrust

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“We could go back now,” I kept saying. They insisted we keep looking.

“How do you encourage people to keep their hope,” Joan asked, “but not their complacency?”

Global-scale alteration from pollution didn’t happen when human societies started using a little bit of fossil fuel. It happened after unrestrained growth, irresponsible management, and a cultural refusal to assign any moral value to excessive consumption. Those habits can be reformed. They have been reformed: several times in the last century we’ve learned that some of our favorite things like DDT and the propellants in aerosol cans were rapidly unraveling the structure and substance of our biosphere. We gave them up, and reversed the threats.

I share with almost every adult I know this crazy quilt of optimism and worries,

And the tendency to feel like a jerk for falling short of absolute conversion.

It’s the worst of bad manners—and self-protection, I think, in a nervously cynical society—to ridicule the small gesture.

searching out redemption where we can find it:

Small, stepwise changes in personal habits aren’t trivial. Ultimately they will, or won’t, add up to having been the thing that mattered.

Like every creature on earth, we want to make it too. We want more time.

Food processing uses energy in two main ways: (1) extracting, dicing, mixing, and cooking the ingredients; (2) transporting each individual ingredient. Products with fewer ingredients have probably burned less gas. For example, the oatmeal box on our pantry shelf lists one ingredient: rolled oats.