Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

by Barbara Kingsolver

  Tuscans and Umbrians have had a lot more time than we have, of course, to recognize the end of the frontier when they see it, and make peace with their place. They were living on and eating from this carefully honed human landscape more than a thousand years before the Pilgrims learned to bury a fish head under each corn plant in the New World. They have chosen to retain in their food one central compelling value: that it's fresh from the ground beneath the diners' feet. The simple pastas still taste of sunshine and grain; the tomatoes dressed with fruity olive oil capture the sugars and heat of late summer; the leaf lettuce and red chicory have the specific mineral tang of their soil; the black kale soup tastes of a humus-rich garden.

  On the road to the fattoria we'd passed a modest billboard that seemed to epitomize the untranslatable difference between Italy's food culture and our own. It's a statement you just don't hear from the tourist boards of America. It promised, simply:

  Nostro terra...

  E suo sapore.

  I'm no expert, but I see what it means: You can taste our dirt.

  16 * SMASHING PUMPKINS

  October

  Driving through our little town in late fall, still a bit love-struck for Tuscany's charm, I began to see my home through new eyes. We don't have medieval hilltop towns here, but we do have bucolic seasonal decor and we are not afraid to use it. "Look," I cried to my family, "we live in Pleasantville." They were forced to agree. Every store window had its own cheerful autumnal arrangement to celebrate the season. The lampposts on Main Street had corn shocks tied around them with bright orange ribbons. The police station had a scarecrow out front.

  As I have mentioned, yard art is an earnest form of self-expression here. Autumn, with its blended undertones of "joyful harvest" and "Trickor-Treat kitsch," brings out the best and worst on the front lawns: colorful displays of chrysanthemums and gourds. A large round hay bale with someone's legs hanging out of its middle. (A pair of jeans and boots stuffed with newspaper, I can only hope; we'll call it a farm safety reminder.) One common theme runs through all these dioramas, and that is the venerable pumpkin. They were lined up in rows, burnished and proud and conspicuous, the big brass buttons on the uniform of our village. On the drive home from our morning's errands we even passed a pumpkin field where an old man and a younger one worked together to harvest their crop, passing up the orange globes and stacking them on the truck bed to haul to market. We'd driven right into a Norman Rockwell painting.

  Every dog has its day, and even the lowly squash finally gets its month. We may revile zucchini in July, but in October we crown its portly orange cousin the King Cucurbit and Doorstop Supreme. In Italy I had nursed a growing dread that my own country's food lore had gone over entirely to the cellophane side. Now my heart was buoyed. Here was an actual, healthy, native North American vegetable, non-shrink-wrapped, locally grown, and in season, sitting in state on everybody's porch.

  The little devil on my shoulder whispered, "Oh yeah? You think people actually know it's edible?"

  The angel on the other shoulder declared "Yeah" (too smugly for an angel, probably), the very next morning. For I opened our local paper to the food section and found a colorful two-page spread under the headline "Pumpkin Possibilities." Pumpkin Curry Soup, Pumpkin Satay! The food writer urged us to think past pie and really dig into this vitamin-rich vegetable. I was excited. We'd grown three kinds of pumpkins that were now lodged in our root cellar and piled on the back steps. I was planning a special meal for a family gathering on the weekend. I turned a page to find the recipes.

  As I looked them over, Devil sneered at Angel and kicked butt. Every single recipe started with the same ingredient: "1 can (15 oz) pumpkin."

  I could see the shopping lists now:

  1 can pumpkin (for curry soup)

  1 of those big orangey things (for doorstep).

  Come on, people. Doesn't anybody remember how to take a big old knife, whack open a pumpkin, scrape out the seeds, and bake it? We can carve a face onto it, but can't draw and quarter it? Are we not a nation known worldwide for our cultural zest for blowing up flesh, on movie and video screens and/or armed conflict? Are we in actual fact too squeamish to stab a large knife into a pumpkin? Wait till our enemies find out.

  Two days later my mother walked in the kitchen door, catching me in the act of just such a murder, and declared "Barbara! That looks dangerous."

  I studied my situation objectively: the pumpkin was bluish (not from asphyxiation) but clinging tenaciously to life. I was using a truly enormous butcher knife, but keeping my fingers out of harm's way. "Mom, this is safe," I insisted. "I have good knife skills."

  Where her direct descendants are concerned, my mother's opinion is that a person is never too old to lose digits or eyesight in the normal course of events.

  Dad is another story. To be frank, he's the reason Mom's worry-skills remain acutely honed. Naturally he wanted to get in on the act here. "Step right up!" I said. My father's career, before he retired, covered most kinds of emergency surgery imagined in the twentieth century, carried out in operating rooms that occasionally did not come equipped with electricity. I wasn't going to argue with his knife skills.

  The pumpkin kept the two of us sawing and sweating for a good thirty minutes while we made no appreciable progress. Our victim was a really large pumpkin of the variety called Queensland Blue. The seed catalog had lured me in with testimonials about its handsome, broad-shouldered Aussie physique and tasty yellow flesh. Next year, Amadeo's warty Zucche de Chioggia would get to vie for the World Cup title of our pumpkin patch, but for now the Queensland Blue ruled. And this one was not yielding. My surgical assistant and I sawed some more, taking frequent breaks to review and strategize. I lusted in my heart after one of those "1 can (15 oz) pumpkin" recipes.

  Cooking pumpkin from scratch may not be for the fainthearted, but it's generally not that hard. I wasn't merely trying to hack it to pieces--if that had been our goal, Dad would have dispatched it in no time flat. But I was being girly, insisting on cutting open the top as neatly as possible to scoop out the seeds and turn the whole thing into a presentable tureen in which to bake pumpkin soup. I have two different cookbooks that feature this as a special-guest recipe. Meanwhile we received plenty of advice from the bystanders (what are families for?), all boiling down to the opinion that it would taste exactly the same if we just smashed it. But this was a special dinner and I was doing it up right. "You'll see, go away," I said sweetly, waving my knife. I never went to chef school but I know what they say: presentation, presentation, presentation.

  Our occasion was Thanksgiving declared a month early, since all of us wouldn't be able to convene on the actual day. Turkeys galore were now wedged into our freezer, postharvest, but today's family gathering included some vegetarians who would not enjoy a big dead bird on the table, however happily it might have lived its life. Meatless cooking is normal to me; I was glad to make a vegetarian feast. But today, as hostess, I felt oddly pressed by tradition to have some kind of large, autumnally harvested being, not just ingredients, as the centerpiece for our meal. A hearty pumpkin soup baked in its own gorgeous body would be just the thing for a turkeyless Thanksgiving.

  Or so I'd thought, before I knew this one would not go gentle into that good night (as Dylan Thomas advised). Even our meanest roosters hadn't raged this hard against the dying of the light. At length, Dad and I ascertained the problem was our Queensland Blue, which was almost solid flesh, lacking the large open cavity in its center that makes the standard jack-o'-lantern relatively easy to open up. We finally performed something like trephination on our client, creating a battle-weary but still reasonably presentable hollowed-out tureen. I rubbed the cavity with sea salt and poured in milk I'd heated with plenty of sage and roasted garlic. (Regular, lactose-free, or soy milk work equally well.) I set it carefully into the oven to bake. According to the recipe, after an hour or so of baking I could use a large spoon to scrape gently at the inside of the tureen, stirring the so
ft, baked pumpkin flesh into the soup.

  Trading Fair and Square

  * * *

  The local food movement addresses many important, interconnected food issues, including environmental responsibility, agricultural sustainability, and fair wages to those who grow our food. Buying directly from small farmers serves all these purposes, but what about things like our pumpkin pie spices, or our coffee, that don't grow where we live?

  We can apply most of the same positive food standards, minus the local connection, to some imported products. Coffee, tea, and spices are grown in environmentally responsible ways by some small-scale growers, mostly in the developing world. We can encourage these good practices by offering a fair wage for their efforts. This approach, termed fair trade, has grown into an impressive international effort to counter the growing exploitation of farmers in these same countries. Consumer support for conscientious small growers helps counter the corporate advantage, and sustains their livelihoods, environments, and communities.

  Coffee is an example of how fair trade can work to the advantage of the grower, consumer, and environment. As an understory plant, coffee was traditionally grown under a shaded mixture of fruit, nut, and timber trees. Large-scale modern production turned it into a monoculture, replacing wild forests with single-crop fields, utterly useless as wildlife habitat, doused heavily with fertilizers and pesticides. This approach is highly productive in the short term, but causes soil erosion and kills tropical biodiversity--including the migratory birds that used to return to our backyards in summer. Not to mention residual chemicals in your coffee. In contrast, farmers using traditional growing methods rely on forest diversity to fertilize the crop (from leaf litter) and help control coffee pests (from the pest predators that are maintained). Although their yields are lower, the shade-grown method sustains itself and supports local forest wildlife. Selecting shade-grown and fairtrade coffee allows these small-farm growers a chance to compete with larger monocrop production, and helps maintain wildlife habitat.

  Independent certification agencies (similar to those that oversee organic agriculture) ensure that fair trade standards are maintained. As demand grows, the variety of products available has also grown to include chocolate, nuts, oils, dried fruits, and even hand-manufactured goods. For more information see www.transfairusa.org, www.fairtrade.net or www.ifat.org.

  * * *

  STEVEN L. HOPP

  I'll now add my own cautions to this recipe: don't scrape too hard, and don't overbake. I confess I may have hoped for a modest flutter of kiss-the-cook applause as I set our regal centerpiece on the table, instead of the round of yelping and dashes for the kitchen towels that actually ensued. The whole thing collapsed. Fortunately, I'd baked it in a big crockery pie dish. We saved the tablecloth, and nine-tenths of the soup.

  My loved ones have eaten my successes and failures since my very first rice pudding, at age nine, for which I followed the recipe to the letter but didn't understand the "1 cup rice" had to be cooked first. Compared with that tooth-cracking concoction, everyone now agreed, my pumpkin soup was great. Really it was, by any standards except presentation (which I flunked flunked flunked), and besides, what is the point of a family gathering if nobody makes herself the goat of a story to be told at countless future family gatherings? Along with Camille's chard lasagna, our own fresh mozzarella, and the season's last sliced tomatoes, we made a fine feast of our battered centerpiece. If anyone held Dad and me under suspicion of vegetable cruelty, they didn't report us. We remain at large.

  A pumpkin is the largest vegetable we consume. Hard-shelled, firm-fleshed, with fully ripened seeds, it's the caboose of the garden train. From the first shoots, leaves, and broccoli buds of early spring through summer's small soft tomato, pepper, and eggplant fruits, then the larger melons, and finally the mature, hard seeds such as dry beans and peanuts, it's a long and remarkable parade. We had recently pulled up our very last crop to mature: peanuts, which open their orange, pealike flowers in midsummer, pollinate and set their seeds, and then grow weirdly long, down-curved stems that nosedive the seed pods earthward, drilling them several inches into the soil around the base of the plant. Many people do realize peanuts are an underground crop (their widespread African name is "ground nut"), although few ever pause to ruminate on how a seed, product of a flower, gets under the dirt. In case you did, wonder no more. Peanuts are the dogged overachievers of the plant kingdom, determined to plant their own seeds without help. It takes them forever, though. Our last ritual act before frost comes is to pull up the peanut bushes and shake the dirt from this botany-freak-show snack food.

  We were ready now for frost to fall on our pastures. We had eaten one entire season of botanical development, in the correct order. Months would pass before any new leaf poked up out of the ground. So...now what?

  Another whole category of vegetable used to carry people through winter, before grocery chains erased the concept of season. This variant on vegetable growth is not an exception but is auxiliary to the leaf-budflower-fruit-seed botanical time lapse I initially posted as the "vegetannual rule" for thinking about what's in season. A handful of food plants are not annuals, but biennials. Their plan is to grow all summer from a seed, lay low through one winter, then burst into flower the following spring. To do it, they frugally store the sugars they've manufactured all summer in a bulky tuber or bulb that hides underground waiting for spring, after their leaves have died back.

  Humans thwart them opportunistically, murdering the plant and robbing its savings account just when the balance is fattest. Carrots, beets, turnips, garlic, onions, and potatoes are all the hard-earned storage units of a plant that intended to live another season in order to fulfill its sexual destiny. As a thrifty person myself, raised to trust hard work, I feel like such a cheat when I dig the root crops. If I put emotion in charge of my diet I would not only be a vegetarian, I'd end up living on air and noodles like a three-year-old because I also feel sorry for the plants. In virtuous green silence they work as hard as any chicken or cow. They don't bleat or wail as we behead them, rip them from their roots, pull their children from their embrace. We allow them no tender mercies.

  But heaven help me, I eat them like nobody's business. Root crops are the deliverance of the home-food devotee. Along with dry beans and grains, they bring vegetable nutrition into months when nothing else fresh is handy. Because they store well, it's easy enough for gardeners to produce a year's worth in the growing season. Some of my neighbors grumble about the trouble of growing potatoes when a giant bag at the store costs less than a Sunday newspaper. And still, every spring, we are all out there fighting with the cold, mucky late-winter soil, trying to get our potatoes in on schedule. We're not doing it for the dimes we'll save. We know the fifty-pound bag from the store tastes about like a Sunday newspaper, compared with what we can grow. A batch of tender new Carolas or Red Golds freshly dug in early summer is its own vegetable: waxy, nutty, and sweet. Peruvian Blues, Russian Banana fingerlings, Yukon Golds: the waxy ones hold together when boiled and cut up for potato salad; others get fluffy and buttery-colored when baked; still others are ideal for oven-roasting. A potatophile needs them all.

  The standard advice on potato planting time is the same as for onions and peas: "as early as the soil can be worked." That is a subjective date, directly related to impatience. I always get stirred up around Saint Patrick's Day and go through my annual ritual of trooping out to the potato bed with a shovel, sticking it in the ground, and scientifically discerning that it's still a half-frozen swamp. You don't need a groundhog for that one: wait a few more weeks. We generally get them in around the first of April.

  Potato plants don't mind cool weather, as long as they're not drowning. They were bred from wild ancestors in the cool, dry equatorial Andean highlands where days and nights are equal in length, year-round. They don't respond to changes in day length to control their maturity. Other root crops are triggered by summer's long days to start banking starch, preparing
for the winter ahead. In fact, onions are so sensitive to day length, onion growers must choose their varieties with a latitude map.

  Temperatures are not a reliable cue--they can rise and fall capriciously during a season, giving us dogwood winter, Indian summer, and all the other folklorically named false seasons. But no fickle wind messes with the track of the sun. It's a crucial decision for a living thing: When, exactly, to shut down leaf growth and pull all resources down into the roots to stock up for winter? A mistake will cost a plant the chance to pass on its genes. So in temperate climates, evolution has tied such life-or-death decisions to day length. Animals use it also, to trigger mating, nesting, egg-laying, and migration.

  But potatoes, owing to their origin in the summerless, winterless, high-altitude tropics, evolved without day-length cues. Instead they have a built-in rest period that is calendar-neutral, and until it's over the tubers won't sprout, period. I learned this the hard way, early in my gardening career, when I planted some store-bought potatoes. I waited as the weather grew warm, but no sprouts emerged. Potatoes are often treated with chemicals to keep them dormant, but I'd planted organic ones with no such excuse for sloth. After about a month I dug them up to see what in the heck was going on with the lazy things. (I'm much more relaxed with my children, I swear.) My potatoes were still asleep. Not one eye was open, not a bump, shoot, or bud.

  Now I know: potatoes have a preprogrammed naptime which cannot for any reason be disturbed. Seed potatoes aren't ready to plant until after they've spent their allotted months in cool storage. I had assumed a spring potato was a spring potato, but these I'd bought from the grocery in March must have been harvested recently in some distant place where March was not the end of winter. The befuddlements of a seasonless vegetable universe are truly boundless.