Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Already I have to amend my list. It would appear that I have run out of August before I even started to write about Kingsolver's "Year Of" memoir Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.  Since I'm excited to read Josh Foer's book next, I will just have to go back and forth a bit--as I said, the rules are one book a month, but I can be flexible.

I came across an interesting article in the Science section of the Times the other day by John Tierney regarding some of the ideas behind the local foods movement. In discussing Charles C. Mann's book 1493, he points out that all of what we eat today--and even how we grow it--has been affected permanently by the "Columbian exchange," the passage of foods, materials, animals, and microorganisms around the world through trade and travel, so that all those who claim to be "eating local" by growing chili peppers, tomatoes, all manner of fruits and vegetables are really eating a globalized diet, formed over many centuries of back and forth shuttling. Towards the end of the article, Tierney points out that although Mann is a proud locavore, eating produce mostly from his own garden and local farms, he recognizes the need for a system of inexpensive food production to feed world populations. Being a locavore is more of an aesthetic choice, he claims.

Eaters like Barbara Kingsolver would disagree. Her project is not simply to eat what is grown locally, but to grow most of her food herself on her family farm in Virginia.  If Thoreau went to the woods to live free of the debt he saw others around him mired in, those as he put it, "always on the limits, trying to get into business and trying to get out of debt, a very ancient slough, called by the Latins aes alienum, another's brass, for some of their coins were made of brass; still living, and dying, and buried by this other's brass,"Kingsolver turns to farming to escape a kind of food debt which most of us are currently paying in America.  Kingsolver explains this debt: (at times in somewhat preachy terms, this reader thought) the system of monoculture factory farms, grocery stores packed with processed foods dependent on the corn and soy produced by factory farms, the mistreatment and misbreeding of animals, the issues raised by genetically modified crops, and many other increasingly scary facets of our modern style of eating.

Ironically, Thoreau does all he can to avoid farming, letting his corn languish while his neighbors slave away, but Kingsolver sees her choice of how to eat as one that will free her and her family from the agro-industrial pipeline and perhaps serve as a model for others.  She says, "When we walked as a nation away from the land, our knowledge of food production fell away from us like dirt in a laundry-soap commercial.  Now, it's fair to say, the majority of us don't want to be farmers, see farmers, pay farmers, or hear their complaints."  We don't even understand how our money goes mostly to food processors, distributors, and marketers, Kingsolver continues, when we get our weekly groceries from the supermarket.  Kingsolver says she wishes to know where her food comes from, "to get our food so close to home, we'd know the person who grew it.  Often that turned out to be us. . ." She wants to see how much dirt she can get on her hands, and by the end, they are quite covered with dirt and animal blood and feathers and the delicious produce these bring towards the end of her year of farming and eating.  Even those urban readers, Kingsolver argues, who unable to garden and grow much of their own food, could benefit from an understanding where our food comes from, and how to get to know our meals better.  After all, she adds, we are the ones who finally eat them.

In my eating I'm all for avoiding food debt in the form of miles travelled by my broccoli and bananas, chemicals sprayed on peaches and apples, and genetically modified "Frankenfood," but I think I am still much more like the urban eater who would like to have available most everything in most any season, as much as I enjoy a local peach or a freshly picked ear of corn.  I've contemplated growing a more extensive garden, but have never found quite the right time.

There may be something to the argument that the local foods movement is essentially an elitist or reserved-for-elites kind of project.  It shouldn't be, and I've even seen at some farmers markets stalls with squash and fresh salad greens grown by urban teenagers, but this still seems to be the rare exception, not the norm.  Perhaps books like Kingsolver's can start to change these perceptions, as she hopes to do, but more work must be done.