Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

by Barbara Kingsolver

  First, though, we had to eat the breakfast they'd made in their tiny, efficient kitchen. Everything locally produced: yogurt and strawberries, eggs, salsa made with Amy's enviable tomatoes. We lingered, talking farming and housing, but the day called us out to the fields, where rows of produce were already gulping morning sun. Amy, a self-described perfectionist, apologized for the state of what looked to me like the tidiest rows imaginable--more weedless than our garden on the best of days. Part-time interns sometimes help out, but the farm runs on Amy's full-time dedication.

  A mid-June New England garden, two weeks past the last frost, is predominantly green: lacy bouquets of salad greens, Chinese cabbage, cilantro, broccoli, and peas. A tomato of any type seemed out of the question, until we crested a hill and came upon two long greenhouses. These are the sturdy workhorses of the farm, with heavy-duty plastic skins supported by wooden trusses. Amy no longer grows tomatoes anywhere except in a greenhouse. Cool spring soil, late frosts, and iffy New England weather make the season too short for noteworthy harvests of outdoor-planted tomatoes. But she doesn't grow them hydroponically, as is the norm for large-scale tomato houses. Her greenhouses are built over garden soil, her tomatoes grow in the ground. "They taste better," she said. "It's probably the micronutrients and microfauna in the soil that give them that garden taste. So many components of soil just aren't present in a more sterile environment."

  Heating greenhouses through the Massachusetts winter didn't appeal to Paul and Amy either. After a few years of experiments, they've found it most cost-effective to heat with a combination of propane and woodstoves--or not at all. One of the houses is exclusively a cold frame, extending the season for salad greens, spinach, and other crops that can take temperatures down to the mid-twenties. Amy's greens will sell all winter for about $7 a pound. (In New York City, midwinter mesclun can bring $20.)

  Her second greenhouse is heated, she said, but only in spring. As we approached that one, I peered in the door and actually gasped. Holy tomato. I've never seen healthier, more content-looking plants: ten feet tall, leafy, rising toward heaven on strings stretched from the ground to the rafters. If there were an Angel Choir of tomatoes, these would be singing. The breed she grows is one meant especially for greenhouses, a variety (perfectly enough) called Trust.

  Amy was inspiring to watch, a knowledgeable farmer in her element as she narrowed her eyes for signs of pests, pausing to finger a leaf and study its color. We walked among the tall plants admiring the clusters of fruits hanging from bottom to top in a color gradient from mature red fruits below to the new, greenish white ones overhead. The support strings were rolled around spindles up above that could be cranked to lower the plant down gradually, as the top continues to climb. Tomato plants habitually lose their lower leaves as they grow; the point of this system is to coil the leafless stems on the ground and let the healthy growing part keep twining upward. But these plants were so healthy they refused to lose any lower leaves. Lily played hide-and-seek in the tomato wilderness while Amy showed me her growing system.

  She fine-tunes it a little more each year, but already her operation is an obvious success. The last time she had soil tests, the technicians who came to evaluate her compost-built organic dirt had never seen such high nutrient values. The greatest limitation here is temperature; she could keep tomatoes growing all winter, but the cost of fuel would pass her profit margin. In early spring, when she's starting the plants, she economizes by heating the soil under the seedlings (woodstove-heated water runs through underground pipes) while letting air temperatures drop fairly low. Pushing the season early is more important than late, she says. People will pay more for a June tomato than one in October, when tomatoes are old hat, dropping off the vines in gardens everywhere. By starting in the spring, she can bring bushels of Trust out of her greenhouse to thrilled customers long before anything red is coming out of local gardens.

  I observed that in the first week of June, she could charge anything she wanted for these. She laughed. "I could. But I don't. I belong to this community, people know me. I wouldn't want to take advantage."

  She is more than just part of the community--she was a cofounder of the hugely successful Ashfield farmers' market. She sells to individuals and restaurants, and enjoys a local diet by relying on other producers for the things she doesn't grow. "We don't have chickens, for example, because so many other people do. We trade vegetables for eggs and meat." Their favorite local restaurant buys Amy's produce all summer, the last two months for credit, so that in winter she and Paul can eat there whenever they want. He deems the arrangement "a great substitute for canning."

  Like many small farms, this perfectly organic operation is not certified organic. Amy estimates certification would cost her $700 a year, and she wouldn't gain that much value from it. Virtually everyone who buys her food knows Amy personally; many have visited the farm. They know she is committed to chemical-free farming because she values her health, her products, the safety of interns and customers, and the profoundly viable soil of her fields and greenhouses.

  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. Farmers who sell directly to their customers, on the other hand, generally don't need watchdogs--their livelihood tends to be a mission as well as a business. Amy's customers trust her methods. No federal bureaucracy can replace that relationship.

  Furthermore, the paper trail of organic standards offers only limited guarantees to the consumer. Specifically, it certifies that vegetables were grown without genetic engineering or broadly toxic chemical herbicides or pesticides; animals were not given growth-promoting hormones or antibiotics. "Certified organic" does not necessarily mean sustainably grown, worker-friendly, fuel-efficient, cruelty-free, or any other virtue a consumer might wish for.

  The rising consumer interest in organic food has inspired most of the country's giant food conglomerates to cash in, at some level. These big players have successfully moved the likes of bagged salads and hormone-free milk from boutique to mainstream markets and even big box stores. But low price has its costs. In order to meet federal organic standards as cheaply as possible and maximize profits, some industrial-scale organic producers (though not all) cut every corner that's allowed, and are lobbying the government to loosen organic rules further. Some synthetic additives are now permitted, thanks to pressure from industrial organics. So is animal confinement. A chicken may be sold as "free range" if the house in which it's confined (with 20,000 others) has a doorway leading out to a tiny yard, even though that doorway remains shut for so much of the chickens' lives, they never learn to go outside. This is not a theoretical example. A national brand of organic dairy products also uses confined animals--in this case, cows whose mandated "free range" time may find them at home in crowded pens without water, shade, or anything resembling "the range." 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 over half of U.S. farm workers are undocumented, and all are unlikely to earn more than minimum wage. Those employed by industrial-scale organic farms are spared direct contact with pesticides in their work, at least, but often live with their families in work-camp towns where pesticide drift is as common as poverty.

  The original stated purpose of organic agriculture was not just to protect the quality of food products, but also to safeguard farm environments and communities through diversified, biologically natural practices that remain healthy over time. This was outlined by J. I. Rodale, Sir Albert Howard, Lady Eve Balfour, and all other sig
nificant contributors to the theory and practice of modern organic agriculture. Implicitly, these are values that many consumers still think they're supporting with their purchase of organic products. 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. It may not be possible to prevent the corruption of codified organic standards when they are so broadly applied. A process as complex as sustainable agriculture can't be fully mandated or controlled; the government might as well try to legislate happy marriage. Corporate growers, if their only motive is profit, will find ways to follow the letter of organic regulations while violating their spirit.

  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. Local food is a handshake deal in a community gathering place. It involves farmers with first names, who show up week after week. It means an open-door policy on the fields, where neighborhood buyers are welcome to come have a look, and pick their food from the vine. Local is farmers growing trust.

  9 * SIX IMPOSSIBLE THINGS BEFORE BREAKFAST

  Late June

  When I was in college, living two states away from my family, I studied the map one weekend and found a different route home from the one we usually traveled. I drove back to Kentucky the new way, which did turn out to be faster. During my visit I made sure all my relatives heard about the navigational brilliance that saved me thirty-seven minutes.

  "Thirty-seven," my grandfather mused. "And here you just used up fifteen of them telling all about it. What's your plan for the other twenty-two?"

  Good question. I'm still stumped for an answer, whenever the religion of time-saving pushes me to zip through a meal or a chore, rushing everybody out the door to the next point on a schedule. All that hurry can blur the truth that life is a zero-sum equation. Every minute I save will get used on something else, possibly no more sublime than staring at the newel post trying to remember what I just ran upstairs for. On the other hand, attending to the task in front of me--even a quotidian chore--might make it into part of a good day, rather than just a rock in the road to someplace else.

  I have a farmer friend who would definitely side with my grandfather on the subject of time's economies. He uses draft animals instead of a tractor. Doesn't it take an eternity to turn a whole field with a horse-driven plow? The answer, he says, is yes. 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.'"

  Now that I'm decades older and much less clever than I was in college, I'm getting better at facing life's routines the way my friend faces his cornfield. I haven't mastered the serene mindset on all household chores (What do you do for fun around here? I scrub pots and pans, okay??), but I might be getting there with cooking. Eternal is the right frame of mind for making food for a family: cooking down the tomatoes into a red-gold oregano-scented sauce for pasta. Before that, harvesting sun-ripened fruits, pinching oregano leaves from their stems, growing these things from seed--yes. A lifetime is what I'm after. Cooking is definitely one of the things we do for fun around here. When I'm in a blue mood I head for the kitchen. I turn the pages of my favorite cookbooks, summoning the prospective joyful noise of a shared meal. I stand over a bubbling soup, close my eyes, and inhale. From the ground up, everything about nourishment steadies my soul.

  Yes, I have other things to do. For nineteen years I've been nothing but a working mother, one of the legions who could justify a lot of packaged, precooked foods if I wanted to feed those to my family. I have no argument with convenience, on principle. I'm inordinately fond of my dishwasher, and I like the shiny tools that lie in my kitchen drawers, ready to make me a menace to any vegetable living or dead. I know the art of the quickie supper for after-a-long-day nights, and sometimes if we're too weary we'll go out to a restaurant, mainly to keep the kitchen clean.

  But if I were to define my style of feeding my family, on a permanent basis, by the dictum, "Get it over with, quick," something cherished in our family life would collapse. And I'm not just talking waistlines, though we'd miss those. I'm discussing dinnertime, the cornerstone of our family's mental health. If I had to quantify it, I'd say 75 percent of my crucial parenting effort has taken place during or surrounding the time our family convenes for our evening meal. I'm sure I'm not the only parent to think so. 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 care, priorities, and culture of support. The words: "I'll expect you home for dinner."

  I understand that most U.S. citizens don't have room in their lives to grow food or even see it growing. But I have trouble accepting the next step in our journey toward obligate symbiosis with the packaged meal and takeout. Cooking is a dying art in our culture. Why is a good question, and an uneasy one, because I find myself politically and socioeconomically entangled in the answer. I belong to the generation of women who took as our youthful rallying cry: Allow us a good education so we won't have to slave in the kitchen. We recoiled from the proposition that keeping a husband presentable and fed should be our highest intellectual aspiration. We fought for entry as equal partners into every quarter of the labor force. We went to school, sweated those exams, earned our professional stripes, and we beg therefore to be excused from manual labor. Or else our full-time job is manual labor, we are carpenters or steelworkers, or we stand at a cash register all day. At the end of a shift we deserve to go home and put our feet up. Somehow, though, history came around and bit us in the backside: now most women have jobs and still find themselves largely in charge of the housework. Cooking at the end of a long day is a burden we could live without.

  It's a reasonable position. But it got twisted into a pathological food culture. When my generation of women walked away from the kitchen we were escorted down that path by a profiteering industry that knew a tired, vulnerable marketing target when they saw it. "Hey, ladies," it said to us, "go ahead, get liberated. We'll take care of dinner." They threw open the door and we walked into a nutritional crisis and genuinely toxic food supply. If you think toxic is an exaggeration, read the package directions for handling raw chicken from a CAFO. We came a long way, baby, into bad eating habits and collaterally impaired family dynamics. No matter what else we do or believe, food remains at the center of every culture. Ours now runs on empty calories.

  When we traded homemaking for careers, we were implicitly promised economic independence and worldly influence. But a devil of a bargain it has turned out to be in terms of daily life. We gave up the aroma of warm bread rising, the measured pace of nurturing routines, the creative task of molding our families' tastes and zest for life; we received in exchange the minivan and the Lunchable. (Or worse, convenience-mart hot dogs and latchkey kids.) I consider it the great hoodwink of my generation.

  Now what? Most of us, male or female, work at full-time jobs that seem organized around a presumption that some wifely person is at home picking up the slack--filling the gap between school and workday's end, doing errands only possible during business hours, meeting the expectation that we are hungry when we get home--but in fact June Cleaver has left the premises. Her income was needed to cover the mortgage and health insurance. Didn't the workplace organizers notice? In fact that gal Friday is us, both moms and dads running on overdrive, smashing the caretaki
ng duties into small spaces between job and carpool and bedtime. Eating preprocessed or fast food can look like salvation in the short run, until we start losing what real mealtimes give to a family: civility, economy, and health. A lot of us are wishing for a way back home, to the place where care-and-feeding isn't zookeeper's duty but something happier and more creative.

  "Cooking without remuneration" and "slaving over a hot stove" are activities separated mostly by a frame of mind. The distinction is crucial. Career women in many countries still routinely apply passion to their cooking, heading straight from work to the market to search out the freshest ingredients, feeding their loved ones with aplomb. In France and Spain I've sat in business meetings with female journalists and editors in which the conversation veered sharply from postcolonial literature to fish markets and the quality of this year's mushrooms or leeks. These women had no apparent concern about sounding unliberated; in the context of a healthy food culture, fish and leeks are as respectable as postcolonial literature. (And arguably more fun.)

  Full-time homemaking may not be an option for those of us delivered without trust funds into the modern era. But approaching mealtimes as a creative opportunity, rather than a chore, is an option. Required participation from spouse and kids is an element of the equation. An obsession with spotless collars, ironing, and kitchen floors you can eat off of--not so much. We've earned the right to forget about stupefying household busywork. But kitchens where food is cooked and eaten, those were really a good idea. We threw that baby out with the bathwater. It may be advisable to grab her by her slippery foot and haul her back in here before it's too late.