Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

by Barbara Kingsolver

  I imagined the kitchen employees who carved this pepper crown and lemon tulip, arranging this fish on his throne. No hash slingers here, but food poets, even in an ordinary budget roadside hotel. We'd come in expecting steam-table food, and instead we found cabbages and kings.

  The roads of Abruzzi, Umbria, and Tuscany led us through one spectacular agrarian landscape after another. On the outskirts of large cities, most of the green space between apartment buildings was cordoned into numerous tidy vegetable gardens and family-sized vineyards. Growing your own, even bottling wine on a personal scale, were not eccentric notions here. I've seen these cozy, packed-in personal gardens in blocks surrounding European cities everywhere: Frankfurt, London, every province of France. After the abrupt dissolution of the Soviet Union's food infrastructure, community gardeners rallied to produce a majority of the fruits and vegetables for city populations that otherwise might have starved.

  Traversing the Italian countryside, all of which looked ridiculously perfect, we corroborated still another cliche: all roads actually do lead to Rome. Every crossroads gave us a choice of blue arrows pointing in both directions, for ROMA. Beyond the cities, the wide valleys between medieval hilltop towns were occupied by small farms, each with its own modest olive grove, vineyard, a few fig or apple trees (both were ripe in September), and a dozen or so tomato plants loaded with fruit. Each household also had its own pumpkin patch and several rows of broccoli, lettuces, and beans. Passing by one little stuccoed farmhouse we noticed a pile of enormous, yellowed, overmature zucchini. I made Steven take a picture, as proof of some universal fact of life: they couldn't give all theirs away either. At home we would have considered these "heavers" (that's what we do with them, over the back fence into the woods). But these were carefully stacked against the back wall of the house like a miniature cord of firewood, presumably as winter fuel for a pig or chickens. The garden's secondos would be next year's prosciutto.

  "Dig! Dig! Dig! And Your Muscles Will Grow Big"

  * * *

  On July 9, 2006, in Edinburgh, Scotland, the world lost one of its most successful local-foods advocates of all time: John Raeburn. At the beginning of World War II when Germany vowed to starve the U.K. by blocking food imports with U-boats, Raeburn, an agricultural economist, organized the "Dig for Victory" campaign. British citizens rallied, planting crops in backyards, parks, golf courses, vacant lots, schoolyards, and even the moat of the Tower of London. These urban gardens quickly produced twice the tonnage of food previously imported, about 40 percent of the nation's food supply, and inspired the "Victory Garden" campaign in the United States. When duty called, these city farmers produced.

  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.

  In addition to providing fresh local produce, gardens like these serve as air filters, help recycle wastes, absorb rainfall, present pleasing green spaces, alleviate loss of land to development, provide food security, reduce fossil fuel consumption, provide jobs, educate kids, and revitalize communities. Urban areas cover 2 percent of the earth's surface but consume 75 percent of its resources. Urban gardens can help reduce these flat-footed ecological footprints. Now we just need promotional jingles as good as the ones for John Raeburn's campaign: "Dig! Dig! Dig! And your muscles will grow big."

  For more information visit www.cityfarmer.org or www.urbangardeninghelp.com.

  * * *

  STEVEN L. HOPP

  On a rural road near Lake Trasimeno we stopped at a roadside stand selling produce. We explained that we weren't real shoppers, just tourists with a fondness for vegetables. The proprietor, Amadeo, seemed thrilled to talk with us anyway (slowly, for the sake of our comprehension) about his life's work and passion. He was adamantly organic, a proud founding member of Italy's society of organic agriculture.

  His autumn display was anchored by melons, colorful gourds, and enough varieties of pumpkin to fill a seed catalog for specialists. I was particularly enchanted with one he had stacked into pyramids all around his stand. It was unglamorous by conventional standards: dark blue-green, smaller than the average jack-o'-lantern, a bit squat, and covered over 100 percent of its body with bluish warts. He identified it as Zucche de Chioggia. We took photos of it, chatted a bit more, and then moved on, accepting the Italian tourist's obligation to visit more of the world's masterpieces than the warty pumpkin-pyramids of Amadeo.

  At day's end we were headed back, after having taken full advantage of an olive oil museum, a farmers' market, two castles, a Museum of Fishing, and a peace demonstration sponsored by the Italian government. We passed by the same vegetable stand on our return trip and couldn't resist stopping back in to say hello. Amadeo recognized us as the tourists with no vegetable purchasing power, but was as hospitable as ever. He'd had a fine day, he said, though his pyramids had not exactly been ransacked. I admired that pumpkin, asking its name again (writing it down this time), and whether it was edible. Amadeo sighed patiently. Edible, signora? He gave me to know this wart-covered cucurbit I held in my hand was the most delicious vegetable known to humankind. If I was any kind of cook, any kind of gardener, I needed to grow and eat them myself.

  I asked if he had any seeds, glancing around for one of those racks. He leaned toward me indulgently, summoning the disposition that all good people of the world maintain toward the earnest dimwitted: the seeds, he explained, are inside the pumpkin.

  Oh. Yes, right. But...I struggled (in the style to which I'd become accustomed) to explain our predicament, gesturing toward our rental car. We were just passing through, in possession of no knives, no kitchen, no means of getting the seeds out of the pumpkin. Amadeo suffered our helplessness patiently. We would be going to a hotel? he asked. A hotel with...a kitchen? They could cook this pumpkin for us any number of ways, baked, sauteed, turned into soup, after setting aside the seeds for us.

  I frankly could not imagine sallying into the kitchen of our hotel and asking anyone to carve up a pumpkin, but we were in so deep by now I figured I'd just buy the darn thing and leave it in a ditch somewhere. Or maybe, somehow, figure out how to extract its seeds. But I had to ask one more question. A pumpkin grown in a field with other kinds of winter squash would be cross-pollinated by bees. The seeds would sprout into all sorts of interesting combinations, none of which you'd ever really want. I asked about this in my halting Franco-Spitalian.

  The light dawned over his face. He understood perfectly, and began talking a mile a minute. He gestured toward a basket of assorted bright, oddly shaped gourds, and told me those were allowed to cross with each other freely, with the obvious sordid results. He wanted to make sure I understood. "Signora, it would be as if you had not married an Italian. Your children could be anything at all!"

  Not married an Italian--Mama mia! I shuddered, to make my sentiments clear. Amadeo then seemed satisfied that he could continue the genetics lesson. On his farm, Zucche de Chioggia was prized above all other pumpkins, and thus was raised in a "seminario" where the seeds would breed true to type.

  A seminary? I pondered the word, struggling for cognates, only able to picture a classroom of pious young pumpkins devoting themselves to Bible study. Then I chuckled, realizing there must be a common root somewhere--the defining condition having to do with these chaste fellows all keeping their genes to themselves. How could we not buy such a well-qualified vegetable? Off we drove with our precious cargo, warts and all.

  Back in our hotel room, I paced around staring at it, trying to summon the courage to take it down to the dining room. "You take it," I prodded Steven.

  "No way," was his helpful reply.

  We're too American. We lost our n
erve. We dined well, but no seminary-trained pumpkin met its maker that night.

  A type of tourist establishment exists in Italy that does not easily translate: categorically called agriturismo, it's a guest accommodation on a working family farm. The rooms tend to be few in number, charmingly furnished, in a picturesque setting, similar to a bed and breakfast with the addition of lunch and dinner, plus the opportunity to help hoe the turnips and harvest the grapes if a guest is so inclined. The main point of the visit for the guest, however, is dinner, usually served family-style at a long wooden table adjacent to the kitchen. Virtually everything set down upon that table, from the wine, olive oil, and cheeses to the after-dinner liqueur, will have been grown and proudly fabricated on the premises. The growers and fabricators will be on hand to accept the diners' queries and appreciation. The host family will likely join the guests at the table, discussing the meal's preparation while enjoying it. By law, this type of accommodation must be run by farmers whose principal income derives from farming rather than tourism. The guest rooms must be converted from farm buildings; all food served must be the farm's own. Fakes are not tolerated.

  This hospitality tradition is big business in Italy, with 9,000 establishments hosting more than 10 million bed-nights in a typical recent year, turning over nearly 500 million euros. The notion of agri-vacationing originated in the days (not so long ago) when urban Italians routinely made trips to the countryside to visit relatives and friends who were still on the farm. Any farmstead with a little extra in the storehouse could hang a leafy bough out on the public highway, announcing that travelers were welcome to stop in, sample, and purchase some of the local bounty to take home. It was customary for city-dwelling Italians to spend a few nights out in the country, whenever they could get away, tasting regional specialties at their freshest and best.

  It still is customary. The farmhouse holiday business attracts some outsiders, but during our foray through Italian agritourism we met few other foreigners, mostly from elsewhere in Europe. The great majority of our companions at the farm table had traveled less than 100 kilometers. Whether old or young, from Rome or Perugia, their common purpose was to remind themselves of the best flavors their region had to offer. We chatted with elderly couples who were nostalgic for the tastes of their rural childhoods. One young couple, busy working parents, had looked forward to this as their first romantic getaway since the birth of their twins two years earlier. Most guests were urban professionals whose hectic lives were calmed by farm weekends when they could exchange the cell phone's electronic jingle for a rooster's wake-up call and the gentle mooing of Chianina cattle. And more to the point, eating the aforementioned beasts.

  These Italian agri-tourists were lovely dinner companions who met the arrival of each course with intense interest, questions, and sometimes applause. My customary instincts about rural-urban antipathy ran aground here where our farmer hosts, wearing aprons tied over their work clothes, were the stars of the evening, basking in the glow of their city guests' reverent appreciation.

  The farm hotel often has the word fattoria in its name. It sounds like a place designed to make you fat, and I can't argue with that, but it means "farm," deriving from the same root as factory--a place where things get made. Our favorite fattoria was in Tuscany, not far from Siena, where many things were getting made on the day we arrived, including wine. We watched the grapes go through the crusher and into giant stainless steel fermenting tanks in a barn near our guest room. Some guests had brought work gloves to help pick grapes the next morning. We were on vacation from farm work, thanks, but walked around the property to investigate the gardens and cattle paddocks. A specialty of the house here was the beef of Chianina, the world's largest and oldest breed of cattle, dating back to Etruscan times. Snow white, standing six feet at the shoulder, they are gentle by reputation but I found them as intimidating as bison.

  In a vegetable garden near the main house an elderly farm worker walked slowly along on his knees, planting lettuces. When he finished his row he came over to talk with us, making agreeable use of his one word of English, "Yes!" Nevertheless we managed to spend an hour asking him questions; he was patient with the linguistically challenged, and his knowledge was encyclopedic. It takes 100 kilograms of olives to make 14 kilos of oil. The pH is extremely important. The quality of olives grown on this farm were (naturally) the best, with some of the lowest acid levels in all the world's olive oil. This farm also produced a nationally famous label of wine, along with beef and other products. I was curious about wintertime temperatures here, which he said rarely dropped lower than freezing, although in '87 a Siberian wind brought temperatures of -9degF, killing olive trees all over central Italy. On this farm they'd had no harvest for six years afterward, but because they had a very old, established orchard, it recovered.

  All the olives here were harvested by hand. Elsewhere, in much of Italy, older trees have been replaced in the last two decades by younger orchards trimmed into small, neat box shapes for machine harvest. Mechanization obviously increases productivity, but the Italian government is now making an effort to preserve old olive orchards like the ones on this farm, considering their twisted trunks and spreading crowns to be a classic part of the nation's cultural heritage.

  Our new tour guide was named Amico. We seemed to be working our way through the alphabet of colorful Italian patriarchs. And if Amadeo was poetically devout, Amico really was Friendship personified. He showed us the field of saffron crocuses, an ancient and nearly extinct Tuscan crop that is recently being revived. Next came the vineyards. I asked how they protected the grapes from birds. He answered, by protecting their predators: civet cats, falcons, and owls patrol the farm by turns, day and night. Amico was also a big fan of bats, which keep down the insects, and of beneficial ladybugs. And he really loved the swallows that build their mud nests in the barns. They are marvelous birds, he insisted, rolling his eyes heavenward and cupping a hand over his heart. His other deepest passion appeared to be Cavolo Nero de Toscana--Tuscan black kale. He gave us an envelope of its tiny seeds, along with careful instructions for growing and cooking it. We were going to have Tuscan kale soup for supper that very night, a secret he disclosed with one of those long Italian-guy sighs.

  At dinnertime, we were surprised when Amico took his place at the head of the table. He introduced himself to the rest of the guests, opening his arms wide to declare, "Amico de tutti!" This kind old man in dirty jeans we had taken that afternoon for a field hand was in fact the owner of this substantial estate. I took stock of my assumptions about farmers and landowners, modesty and self-importance. I'm accustomed to a culture in which farmers are either invisible, or a joke. From the moment I'd spied draft horses turning the soil of a glamorous city's outskirts, Italy just kept surprising me.

  That does it, I told Steven later that night, retrieving our well-traveled Zucche de Chioggia from the car. They're not going to kick us out of this place for possession of pumpkin with agricultural intent. At worst they might tell us it's doo-doo because it was grown in a different province. But no, the housekeeper admired it the next morning, and the kitchen staff without hesitation handed over an enormous knife and spoon. They suggested we butcher it down by the chicken and pig pens, where any fallout would be appreciated.

  Indeed, the enormous pink pigs sniffed the air, snorted, and squealed as we whacked open our prize. Its thick flesh was custardy yellow, with a small cavity in the center packed with huge white seeds. We took pity on the wailing hogs and chopped up the pumpkin flesh for their dinner rather than ours, distributing the pieces carefully among the pens to avoid a porcine riot. Back in our room, I washed the sticky pulp from the seeds as best I could in our bathroom sink, but really needed a colander, which the kitchen staff also happily supplied. For the rest of our stay we spread out the seeds on towels in the sun, but they weren't completely dried by the time we had to depart from the fattoria. They would mildew and become inviable if we left them packed in a suitcase, so the re
st of our Italian vacation (in the rain, on the train) was in some way organized around opportunities to spread out the seeds for further drying. Most challenging was a fancy hotel room in Venice, where I put them in a heavy, hand-blown glass ashtray on the dresser. We were going out for the whole day so I left a note to housekeeping, whom I feared would throw them away. I gave it my best, something like: "Please not to disturb the seminary importants, Thanking You!"

  But most of our days were spent in bucolic places where we and our seeds could all bask in the Tuscan sunshine, surrounded by views too charming to be believed. The landscape of rural central Italy is nothing like the celebrated tourist sights of North America: neither the uninhabited wildness of the Grand Tetons, nor the constructed grandeur of the Manhattan skyline. Tuscany is just farms, like my home county. Its beauty is a harmonious blend of the natural and the domestic: rolling hills quilted with yellowy-green vineyard rows running along one contour, silvery-green circles of olive trees dotting another. The fields of alfalfa, sunflowers, and vegetables form a patchwork of shapes in shades of yellow and green, all set at different angles, with dark triangles of fencerows and woodlots between them.

  The effect is both domestic and wild, equal parts geometric and chaotic. It's the visual signature of small, diversified farms that creates the picture-postcard landscape here, along with its celebrated gastronomic one. Couldn't Americans learn to love landscapes like these around our cities, treasuring them not just gastronomically but aesthetically, instead of giving everything over to suburban development? Can we only love agriculture on postcards?