Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

by Barbara Kingsolver

  "You make cheese yourself," she repeated reverently. "You are a real housewife."

  It has taken me decades to get here, but I took that as a compliment.

  Our search kept us moving through Montreal's global neighborhoods until we arrived at the grand farmers' market of Petite Italie. An arrangement of flowering plants near the entrance spelled out "Benvenuto." Under an awning that covered several blocks, matrons with bulging bags crowded the aisles between open stalls spilling over with fresh goods. This was the place to shop, in any language.

  I tried French, since I don't speak Italian. Elles sont d'ou, les tomates?

  D'ici, madame! From right here, Quebec, the vendors replied proudly, again and again. (Except for one sardonic farmer who answered, when I asked about his eggs, "From chickens, madame.") We were flat-out amazed to see what enterprising Quebecois growers had managed to bring out already, on the first official day of summer here in the recently frozen north: asparagus, carrots, lettuce, rhubarb, hothouse tomatoes, and small, sweet strawberries. Maple syrup and countless other maple products were also abundant, of course, here where a maple leaf is literally the flag. More surprising were the local apples, plenty of them, that had been stored since their harvest late last fall but still burst sweet and crisp under our teeth when we sampled them. English orchardists once prized certain apples for their late-bearing and good storage qualities--varieties now mostly lost from the British Isles, crowded out by off-season imports from New Zealand. Evidently the good storage heirlooms have not been lost from Quebec.

  I picked up a gargantuan head of broccoli. It looked too good to be true, but the cabbage family are cool-season crops. I asked the vendor where it came from.

  "L'Amerique du Sud, madame," he replied. South America.

  Too bad, I thought. But really, South America, where it's either tropical or now wintertime? "Quel pays?" I asked him--which country?

  "La Californie, madame."

  I laughed. It was a natural mistake. In the world map of produce, California might as well be its own country. A superpower in fact, one state that exports more fresh produce than most countries of the world. If not for the fossil fuels involved, this culinary export could have filled me with patriotic pride. Our country is not only arches and cowboy hats, after all. We just don't get credit for this as "American food" because vegetables are ingredients. The California broccoli would be diced into Asian stir-fries, tossed with Italian pasta primavera, or served with a bowl of mac-and-cheese, according to the food traditions of us housewives.

  Still, whether we get cultural points for them or not, those truckloads of California broccoli and artichokes bring winter cheer and vitamins to people in drearier climes all over the world. From now until September the Quebecois would have local options, but in February, when the snow is piled up to the windowsills and it takes a heating pad on the engine block to get the car started, fresh spinach and broccoli would be a welcome sight. I'd buy it if I lived here, and fly the flag of La Californie in my kitchen. Even down in Dixie I'd bought winter cucumbers before, and would probably do it again. I wondered: once I was out of our industrial-food dry-out, would I be able to sample the world's vegetable delights responsibly--as a social broccoli buyer--without falling into dependency? California vegetables are not the serpent, it's all of us who open our veins to the flow of gas-fueled foods, becoming yawning addicts, while our neighborhood farms dry up and blow away. We seem to be built with a faulty gauge for moderation.

  In the market we bought apples, maple syrup, bedding plants for our hosts' garden, and asparagus, because the season was over at home. Like those jet-setters who fly across the country on New Year's Eve, we were going to cheat time and celebrate the moment more than once. Asparagus season, twice in one year: the dream vacation.

  We left Canada by way of Niagara Falls, pausing to contemplate this churning cataract that has presented itself to humans down through the ages as inspiration, honeymoon destination, and every so often a rip-snorting carnival ride. We got ourselves soaked on the Maid of the Mist, and pondered the derring-do of the fourteen men, two women, and one turtle who have plunged over this crashing waterfall in conveyances including wooden barrels, a giant rubber ball, a polyethylene kayak, a diving bell, a jet-ski, and in one case only jeans and a lightweight jacket. Both women and the turtle (reputed to be 105 years old) survived, as did nine of the men, though the secret of success here is hard to divine. The jacket-and-jeans guy made it; the jet-skier and the kayaker did not, nor did William "Red" Hill in his fancy rubber bubble. And a half-ton iron-bumpered barrel that safely delivered the turtle failed to save his inventive human companion.

  If there seems to be, running through this book, a suggestion that humans are a funny animal when it comes to respecting our own best interests, I rest my case.

  From the border we traveled southwest across the wine country of New York and northern Pennsylvania, where endless vineyards flank the pebbled shore of Lake Erie. Another day's drive brought us into the rolling belly of Ohio, where we would be visiting friends on their dairy farm. Their rural county looked like a postcard of America's heartland, sent from a time when the heart was still healthy. Old farmhouses and barns stood as quiet islands in the undulating seas of corn, silvery oats, and auburn spelt.

  We pulled into our friends' drive under a mammoth silver maple. Lily sized up the wooden swing that twisted on twenty-foot ropes from one of its boughs. A platoon of buff-colored hens ignored us, picking their way over the yard, while three old dogs trotted out to warn their mistress of our arrival. Elsie came around the corner, beaming her pure-sunshine smile. "Rest on the porch," she said, drawing us glasses of water from the pump in the yard. "David is cultivating the corn, so there's no knowing when that will finish."

  We offered to help with whatever she'd been doing, so Elsie rolled the wheelbarrow to her garden and returned with a tall load of pea plants she had just pulled. We pulled lawn chairs into a circle under the cherry trees, lifted piles of vines into our laps, and tackled the shelling. Peas are a creature of spring, content to germinate in cold soil and flourish in cool, damp days, but heat causes them to stop flowering, set the last of their pods, and check out. Though nutritionally similar, peas and beans inhabit different seasons; in most gardens the peas are all finished before the first bean pod is ready to be picked. That's a good thing for the gardener, since each of these plants in its high season will bring you to your knees on a daily basis. Tall, withered pea vines are a sigh from the end of spring, a pause before the beans, squash, and tomatoes start rolling.

  We caught up on news while steadily popping peas from their shells. Over our heads hung Stark's Gold cherries the size of silver dollars. The central Ohio season was a week or so behind ours, and it was dryer here too. Elsie reported they'd had no rain for nearly a month--a fairly disastrous course for June, a peak growing time for crops and pastures. A few storms had gathered lately but then dissipated. The afternoon was still: no car passed on the road, no tractor churned a field within earshot. It's surprising how selectively the human ear attends to human-made sounds: speech, music, engines. An absence of those is what we call silence. Maybe in the middle of a city, or a chemically sterilized cornfield, it really is quiet when all the people and engines cease. But in that particular dot on the map I was struck with how full a silence could be: a Carolina wren sang from the eave of the shed; cedar waxwings carried on whispery bickerings up in the cherry; a mockingbird did an odd jerky dance, as if seized by the bird spirit, out on the driveway. The pea bowl rang like an insistent bell as we tossed in our peas.

  We heard mooing as thirty caramel brown Jersey cows came up the lane. Elsie introduced her daughter Emily and son-in-law Hersh, who waved but kept the cows on course toward the milking barn. Lily and I shook pea leaves off our laps and followed. Emily and Hersh, who live next door, do the milking every day at 5:00 a.m. and p.m. Emily coaxed the cows like children into the milking parlor ("Come on, Lisette, careful with your feet") and
warned me to step back from Esau, the bull. "He's very bossy and he doesn't like women," she said. "I don't think the cows care much for him either, for the same reason. But he sires good milkers."

  While Emily moved the cows through, Hersh attached and moved the pipelines of the milking machine. During lulls the couple sat down together on a bench while their toddler Noah bumped through the milking parlor and adjacent rooms, bouncing off doorjambs and stall sides in his happy orbit. Lily helped him into a toddler swing that hung in the doorway. The milking machine made a small hum but otherwise the barn was quiet, save for the jostling cows munching hay. The wood of the barn looked a hundred years old, dusty and hospitable. I couldn't imagine, myself, having an unbreakable milking date with every five o'clock of this world, but Emily seemed not to mind it. "We're so busy the rest of the day, going different directions," she said. "The milking gives us a time for Hersh and me to sit a minute."

  A busy little pride of barn cats gathered near the bench, tails waving, to lap up milk-pipe overflows collected in a pie plate. I watched a few hundred gallons of Jersey milk throbbing and flowing upward through the maze of clear, flexible pipes like a creamy circulatory system. A generator-powered pump drew the milk from the cows' udders into a refrigerated stainless steel tank. The truck from an organic cooperative comes to fetch it to the plant where it is pasteurized and packed into green-and-white cartons. Where it may go from there is anyone's guess. Our own supermarket back home stocks the brand, so over the years our family may have purchased milk that came from this barn, or at least some molecules of it mixed in with milk from countless other farms. As long as it meets the company's standards, with a consistent cream percentage and nominal bacterial counts, milk from this farm becomes just another part of the blend, an anonymous commodity. This loss of identity seemed a shame, given its origin. The soil minerals and sweetness of this county's grass must impart their own flavor to the milk, just as the regions of France flavor their named denominations of wine.

  David came in from the cornfield shortly after milking time. He laughed at himself for having lost track of time--as Elsie predicted--while communing with his corn. We stood for a minute, retracting the distances between our lives. Both David and Elsie are possessed of an ageless, handsome grace. Elsie is the soul of unconditional kindness, while David sustains a deadpan irony about the world and its inhabitants, including his colleagues who wear the free caps with Cargill or Monsanto logos: "At least they let you know who's controlling their frontal lobes." David and Elsie live and work in exactly the place they were born, in his case the same house and farm. It's a condition lamented in a thousand country music ballads, but seems to have worked out well for this couple.

  We carried dishes of food from the kitchen to a picnic table under the cherry trees. Hersh joined us, settling Noah into a high chair while Emily brought a pitcher of milk from the tank in the barn. Obviously this family had the genes to drink it. For the first time in awhile, I had C/T13910-gene envy. Dinner conversation roamed from what we'd seen growing in Canada to what's new for U.S. farmers. David was concerned about the National Animal Identification System, through which the USDA now plans to attach an ID number and global positioning coordinates to every domestic animal in the country. Anyone who owns even one horse, chicken, cow, or canary will be required by law to get onto the map and this federal database. Farmers aren't cottoning to the plan, to put it mildly. "Mark Twain's wisdom comes to mind," David observed. "'Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it.'" But in truth he's not too worried, as he doubts the government will be up to the job. Forcing half a million farmers to register every chicken and cow, he predicts, will be tougher than getting Afghan farmers to quit growing poppies.

  The steer that had contributed itself to the meatballs on our plates had missed the sign-up. Everything else on the table was also a local product: the peas we'd just shelled, the salad picked ten minutes earlier, the strawberries from their daughter. I asked Elsie how much food they needed from outside the community. "Flour and sugar," she said, and then thought a bit. "Sometimes we'll buy pretzels, for a splurge."

  It crossed my mind that the world's most efficient psychological evaluation would have just the one question: Define splurge. I wondered how many more years I'd have to stay off Belgian chocolate before I could attain Elsie's self-possession. I still wanted the moon, really--and I wanted it growing in my backyard.

  After dinner, the long evening of midsummer still stretched ahead of us. David was eager to show us the farm. We debated the relative merits of hitching up David's team and driving the wagon, versus our hybrid gas-electric vehicle, new to us, now on its first road trip. The horses had obvious appeal, but David and Hersh had heard about the new hybrids and were eager to check out this technology. David confessed to having long ago dreamed up (while cultivating his corn) the general scheme of harnessing the friction from a vehicle's braking, capturing that energy to assist with forward momentum. Turns out, Toyota was right behind him on that. We piled into the vehicle that does not eat oats, and rode up the dusty lane past the milking barn, up a small rise into the fields.

  As Elsie had said, the drought here was manifest. The animal pastures looked parched, though David's corn still looked good--or fairly good, depending. The lane divided two fields of corn that betrayed different histories: the plot on our left had been conventionally farmed for thirty years before David took the helm; on our right lay soil that had never known anything but manure and rotation. The disparity between the two fields was almost comically dramatic, like a 1950s magazine ad, except that "new and improved" was not the winner here. Now David treated both sides identically, but even after a decade, the corn on the forever-organic side stood taller and greener.

  The difference is an objective phenomenon of soil science; what we call "soil" is a community of living, mostly microscopic organisms in a nutrient matrix. Organic farming, by definition, enhances the soil's living and nonliving components. Modern conventional farming is an efficient reduction of that process that adds back just a few crucial nutrients of the many that are removed each year when biomass is harvested. At first, it works well. Over time, it's like trying to raise all children on bread, peanut butter, and the same bedtime story every night for ten years. (If they cry, give them more bread, more peanut butter, and the same story twice.) An observer from another planet might think all the bases were covered, but a parent would know skipping the subtleties adds up to slow starvation. In the same way, countless micronutrients are essential to plants. Chemicals that sterilize the soil destroy organisms that fight plant diseases, aerate, and manufacture fertility. Recent research has discovered that just adding phosphorus (the P in all "NPK" fertilizers) kills the tiny filaments of fungi that help plants absorb nutrients. The losses become most apparent in times of stress and drought.

  "So many people were taken in by the pesticide-herbicide propaganda," David said. "Why would we fall for that?" He seemed to carry it like an old war wound, the enduring damage done to this field. By "we" he means farmers like himself, though he didn't apply the chemicals. He came of age early in the era of ammonia-based fertilizers and DDT, but still never saw the intrinsic logic in poisoning things to make a farm.

  As we crested the hill he suddenly motioned for us to stop, get out, and look: we'd caught a horned lark in the middle of his courtship display. He shot straight up from the top of a little knoll in the corn and hovered high in the sky, singing an intense, quivery, question mark of a song, Will she, please, will she? He hung there above us against the white sky in a breathless suspense until--zoom--his flight dance climaxed suddenly in a nosedive. We stood in the bronze light, impressed into silence. We could hear other birds, which Elsie and David distinguished by their evening songs: vesper and grasshopper sparrows, indigo buntings, a wood thrush. Cliff swallows wheeled home toward their bottle-shaped mud nests under the eaves of the barn. Tree swallows, wrens, bluebird
s, mockingbirds, great horned owls, and barn owls also nested nearby. All seemed as important to David and Elsie as the dairy cows that earn them their living.

  Elsie and David aren't Audubon Club members with binoculars and a life list, nor are they hippie idealists trying to save the whales. They are practical farmers saving a livelihood that has been lost to many others who walked the same road. They spare the swallows and sparrows from death by pesticide for lots of reasons, not the least of which is that these creatures are their pesticides. 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. He has seen swallow populations fluctuate year by year, and knows what that will mean. He watches cliff swallows following the mower and binder in the fields, downwind, snapping up leafhoppers and grasshoppers, while the purple martins devour crane 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.

  Losing the Bug Arms Race

  * * *

  What could be simpler: spray chemicals to kill insects or weeds, increase yields, reap more produce and profits. Grow the bottom line by spraying the current crop. From a single-year perspective, it may work. But in the long term we have a problem. The pests are launching a counterattack of their own.