Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

by Barbara Kingsolver

  Nevertheless, in every winter of the world, Arizona schoolchildren fold and snip paper snowflakes to tape around the blackboard. In October they cut out orange paper leaves, and tulips in spring, just as colonial American and Australian schoolchildren once memorized poems about British skylarks while the blue jays or cockatoos (according to continent) squawked outside, utterly ignored. The dominant culture has a way of becoming more real than the stuff at hand.

  Now, at our farm, when the fully predicted snow fell from the sky, or the leaves changed, or tulips popped out of the ground, we felt a shock of thrill. For the kids it seemed like living in storybook land; for Steven and me it was a more normal return to childhood, the old days, the way things ought to be. If we remembered the snow being deeper, the walks to school harder and longer, we refrained from mentioning that to any young person. But the seasons held me in thrall.

  And so those words from the Sara Coleridge poem, "January brings the snow," were singing a loop in my head as I sat at the kitchen table watching the flakes blow around in one of those featherweight boxing-match snowstorms. It was starting to drift at bizarre angles, in very odd places, such as inside the eaves of the woodshed. The school bus would likely bring Lily home early if this kept up, but at the moment I had the house to myself. My sole companion was the crackling woodstove that warms our kitchen: talkative, but easy to ignore. I was deeply enjoying my solitary lunch break, a full sucker for the romance of winter, eating a warmed-up bowl of potato-leek soup and watching the snow. Soon I meant to go outside for a load of firewood, but found it easy to procrastinate. I perused the newspaper instead.

  Half the front page (above the fold) was covered by a photo of a cocker spaniel with an arrow running entirely through his poor fuzzy torso. The headline--A MIRACLE: UNHARMED!--stood in 48-point type, a letter size that big-city newspapers probably reserve for special occasions such as Armageddon. Out here in the heartland, we are not waiting that long. Our local paper's stance on the great big headline letters is: You got 'em, you use 'em.

  The rest of it reads about like any local daily in the land, with breaking news, features, and op-eds from the very same wire services and syndicates that fill the city papers I also read. What sets our newspaper apart from yours, wherever you live, is our astounding front-page scoop--the unharmed transpierced dog, the burned-to-the-ground chicken house, the discovery of an unauthorized garbage dump. That, plus our own obituaries and a festive, locally produced lifestyle section.

  We newspaper readers all have our pet vexations. Somewhere in one of those sections is the column we anxiously turn to for the sole purpose of disagreeing with the columnist. Volubly. Until family members, rolling their eyes, remind us it's a free country and you don't have to read it every time. My own nemesis is not in the World or Op-Ed sections; it's the food column. While I am sick to death of war, corporate crime, and science writers who can't understand the difference between correlation and causation, I try to be open-minded. And yet this food writer has less sense than God gave a goose about where food comes from.

  I'd worked on our relationship, moving through the stages of bafflement, denial, and asking this guy out loud, "Where do you live, the moon?" I knew the answer: he didn't. He was a local fellow writing just for our region of bountiful gardens and farms, doing his best I'm sure. But no one was ever keener on outsourcing the ingredients. The pumpkins of his world all grow in cans, it goes without saying. If it's fresh ingredients you need, you can be sure the combinations he calls for won't inhabit the same continent or season as one another, or you. On this cozy winter day when I was grooving on the snow that stuck in little triangles on my windowpanes, he wanted to talk pesto.

  To lively up anything from pasta to chicken, he said, I should think about fresh basil pesto this week. How do I make it? Easy! I should select only the youngest, mildest flavored leaves, bruising them between my fingers to release the oils before dumping them in my blender with olive oil to make a zingy accompaniment to my meal.

  Excuse me? The basil leaves of our continent's temperate zones had now been frozen down to their blackened stalks for, oh, let's count: three months. Sometimes at this time of year the grocery has little packages containing approximately six leaves of the stuff (young and mild flavored?) for three bucks. If I hauled a big bag of money out to my car and spent the next two days on icy roads foraging the produce aisles of this and the neighboring counties, I might score enough California-grown basil leaves to whip up a hundred-dollar-a-plate pesto meal by the weekend. Gee, thanks for the swell idea.

  Okay, I know, it's a free country, and I'm a grouch. (Just two weeks later this chef took off for other work in a distant city where he remains safe from my beetle-browed scrutiny.) But if Arizona children have to cut out snowflakes in winter, maybe cooking-school students could be held to a similar standard, cutting out construction-paper asparagus in springtime, pumpkins in the fall, basil in summer. Mightn't they even take field trips to farms, four times a year? In our summer garden they'd get a gander at basil bushes growing not as a garnish but a crop. When the leaves begin releasing their fragrance into the dry heat of August, we harvest whole plants by the bushel and make pesto in large batches, freezing it in pint-sized bags. At farmers' markets it starts showing up by the snippet in June and in bulk over the next two months: fresh, fragrant, and inexpensive enough for nongardeners to put up a winter's supply.

  Pesto freezes beautifully. When made in season it costs just a fraction of what the grocery or specialty stores charge for pestos in little jars. It takes very little space when frozen flat in plastic bags, then stacked in the freezer like books on a shelf. A pint bag will thaw in a bowl of warm water in less time than it takes to boil the pasta. Tossed together with some pecans or olives, dried tomatoes, and a grind of Parmesan cheese, it's the best of easy meals. But the time to think of bruising those leaves with our fingers to release the oils would be August. Those of us who don't live in southern California or Florida have to plan ahead, not just for pesto but for local eating in general. That seems obvious. But apparently it isn't, because in public discussions of the subject, the first question that comes up is always the same: "What do you eat in January?"

  I wish I could offer high drama, some chilling tales of a family gnawing on the leather uppers of their Birkenstocks. From childhood I vividly recall a saga of a family stranded in their car in the Mojave Desert who survived by eating the children's box of Crayolas. I hope in those days crayons were made of something yummy like rendered lard, rather than petroleum. In any case, my childish mind fretted for years about the untold bathroom part of the tale. Our family's story pales by comparison. No Chartreuse or Burnt Sienna for us. We just ate ordinary things like pasta with pesto, made ahead.

  In the winter we tended more toward carnivory, probably in answer to the body's metabolic craving for warm stews with more fats and oils. Our local meat is always frozen, except in the rare weeks when we've just harvested poultry, so the season doesn't dictate what's available. A meat farmer has to plan in spring for the entire year, starting the Thanksgiving turkeys in April, so that's when the customer needs to order one. But the crop comes in, and finishes, just as vegetables do. When our farmers' market closed for the winter we made sure our freezer was stocked with grass-finished lamb chops and ground beef, crammed in there with our own poultry. And we would now have fresh eggs in every month, thanks to Lily's foresight in raising good winter layers.

  People who inhabit the world's colder, darker places have long relied on lots of cold-water ocean fish in their diets. Research on this subject has cracked open one more case of humans knowing how to be a sensible animal, before Little Debbie got hold of our brains. Several cross-cultural studies (published in Lancet and the American Journal of Psychiatry, among others) have shown lower rates of depression and bipolar disorder in populations consuming more seafood; neurological studies reveal that it's the omega-3 fatty acids in ocean fish that specifically combat the blues. These compounds (also import
ant to cardiovascular health) accumulate in the bodies of predators whose food chains are founded on plankton or grass--like tuna and salmon. And like humans used to be, before our food animals all went over to indoor dining. Joseph Hibbeln, M.D., of the National Institutes of Health, points out that in most modern Western diets "we eat grossly fewer omega-3 fatty acids now. We also know that rates of depression have radically increased, by perhaps a hundred-fold."

  In the long, dark evenings of January I had been hankering to follow those particular doctor's orders. We badly missed one of our imported former mainstays: wild-caught Alaskan salmon. We'd found no local sources for fish. Streams in our region are swimming with trout, but the only trout in our restaurants were the flying kind, we'd discovered, shipped on ice from Idaho. And we weren't going to go ice fishing. But instead of plankton eaters our local food chain had grass-eaters: pasture-finished beef has omega-3 levels up to six times higher than CAFO beef; that and Lily's egg yolks would get us through. Steven threw extra flax seeds (also rich in omega-3s) into his loaves of bread, to keep the troops happy.

  Legumes were one of our mainstays. Our favorite meal for snow days starts with a pot of beans simmering all afternoon on the woodstove, warming the kitchen while it cooks. An hour before dinnertime I saute a skillet of chopped onions and peppers until they sweetly melt; living half my life in the Southwest won me over to starting chili with a sofrito. Apart from that, my Kentucky chili recipe stands firm: to the bean pot I add the sauteed onions and peppers, two jars of our canned tomatoes, a handful of dried spicy chilies, bay leaves, and a handful of elbow macaroni. (The macaroni is not negotiable.)

  Winter is also the best time for baking: fruit pies and cobblers, savory vegetable pies, spicy zucchini breads, shepherd's pies covered with a lightly browned crust of mashed potatoes. The hot oven is more welcome now than in summertime, and it recaptures the fruits and vegetables we put away in season. We freeze grated zucchini, sliced apples, and other fillings in the amounts required by our pie and bread recipes.

  So many options, and still that omnipresent question about what local fare one could possibly eat in January. I do understand the concern. Healthier eating generally begins with taking one or two giant steps back from the processed-foods aisle. Thus, the ubiquitous foodie presumptions about fresh-is-good, frozen-is-bad, and salads every day. I've enjoyed that program myself, marking it as progress from the tinned green beans and fruit cocktail of my childhood era when produce aisles didn't have so much of everything all the time.

  While declining to return to the canned-pear-half-with-cottage-cheese cookery I learned in high school Home Ec, I've reconsidered some of my presumptions. Getting over the frozen-foods snobbery is important. The broccoli and greens from our freezer stand in just fine for fresh salads, not just nutritionally but aesthetically. I think creatively in winter about using fruit and vegetable salsas, chutneys, and pickles, all preserved back in the summer when the ingredients were rolling us over. Chard and kale are champion year-round producers (ours grow through the snow), and will likely show up in any farmers' market that's open in winter. We use fresh kale in soups, steamed chard leaves for wrapping dolmades, sauteed chard in omelets.

  Another of our cold-weather saviors is winter squash, a vegetable that doesn't get enough respect. They're rich in beta-carotenes, tasty, versatile, and keep their youth as mysteriously as movie stars. We grow yellow-fleshed hubbards, orange butternuts, green-striped Bush Delicata, and an auburn French beauty called a potimarron that tastes like roasted chestnuts. I arranged an autumnal pile of these in a big wooden bread bowl in October, as a seasonal decoration, and then forgot to admire them after a while. I was startled to realize they still looked great in January. We would finally use the last one in April. I've become a tad obsessive about collecting winter squash recipes, believing secretly that our family could live on them indefinitely if the world as we know it should end. My favorite so far is white beans with thyme served in a baked hubbard-squash half. It's an easy meal, impressive enough for company.

  With stuff like this around, who needs iceberg lettuce? Occasionally we get winter mesclun from farming friends with greenhouses, and I have grown spinach under a cold frame. But normal greens season is spring. I'm not sure how lettuce specifically finagled its way, in so many households, from special-guest status to live-in. I tend to forget about it for the duration. At a January potluck or dinner party I'll be taken by surprise when a friend casually suggests, "Bring a green salad." I'll bring an erstwhile salad of steamed chard with antipasto tomatoes, crumbled goat cheese, and balsamic vinegar. Or else everybody's secret favorite: deviled eggs.

  In our first year of conscious locavory (locivory?) we encountered a lot of things we hadn't expected: the truth about turkey sex life; the recidivism rate of raccoon corn burglars; the size attained by a zucchini left unattended for twenty-four hours. But our biggest surprise was January: it wasn't all that hard. Our winter kitchen was more relaxed, by far, than our summer slaughterhouse-and-cannery. November brought the season of our Thanksgiving for more reasons than one. The hard work was over. I'd always done some canning and freezing, but this year we'd laid in a larder like never before, driven by our pledge. Now we could sit back and rest on our basils.

  "Driven" is putting it mildly, I confess. Scratch the surface of any mother and you'll find Scarlett O'Hara chomping on that gnarly beet she'd yanked out of the ground. "I'll never go hungry again" seems to be the DNA-encoded rallying cry for many of us who never went hungry in the first place. When my family headed into winter my instincts took over, abetted by the Indian Lore books I'd read in childhood, which all noted that the word for February in Cherokee (and every other known native tongue) was "Hungry Month."

  After the farmers' market and our garden both closed for the season, I took an inventory of our pantry. During our industrious summer we'd canned over forty jars of tomatoes, tomato-based sauces, and salsa. We'd also put up that many jars of pickles, jams, and fruit juice, and another fifty or so quarts of dried vegetables, mostly tomatoes but also soup beans, peppers, okra, squash, root vegetables, and herbs. In pint-sized freezer boxes we'd frozen broccoli, beans, squash, corn, pesto, peas, roasted tomatoes, smoked eggplants, fire-roasted peppers, cherries, peaches, strawberries, and blueberries. In large ziplock bags we froze quantities of our favorite snack food, whole edamame, which Lily knows how to thaw in the microwave, salt, and pop from the pod straight down the hatch. I do realize I'm lucky to have kids who prefer steamed soybeans to Twinkies. But about 20 million mothers in Japan have kids like that too, so it's not a bolt out of the blue.

  Our formerly feisty chickens and turkeys now lay in quiet meditation (legs-up pose) in the chest freezer. Our onions and garlic hung like Rapunzel's braids from the mantel behind the kitchen woodstove. In the mudroom and root cellar we had three bushels of potatoes, another two of winter squash, plus beets, carrots, melons, and cabbages. A pyramid of blue-green and orange pumpkins was stacked near the back door. One shelf in the pantry held small, alphabetized jars of seeds, saved for starting over--assuming spring found us able-bodied and inclined to do this again.

  That's the long and short of it: what I did last summer. Most evenings and a lot of weekends from mid-August to mid-September were occupied with cutting, drying, and canning. We'd worked like wage laborers on double shift while our friends were going to the beach for summer's last hurrah, and retrospectively that looks like a bum deal even to me. But we had taken a vacation in June, wedged between the important dates of Cherries Fall and the First of Tomato. Next summer maybe we'd go to the beach. But right now, looking at all these jars in the pantry gave me a happy, connected feeling, as if I had roots growing right through the soles of my shoes into the dirt of our farm.

  I understand that's a pretty subjective value, not necessarily impressive to an outsider. It's a value, nonetheless. Food security is no longer the sole concern of the paranoid schizophrenic. Some of my very sane friends in New York and Washington, D.C.,
tell me that city households are advised now to have a two-month food supply on hand at all times. This is advice of a different ilk from the duct-tape-and-plastic response to terrorist attacks, or the duck-and-cover drills of my childhood. We now have looming threats larger than any cold-hearted human's imagination. Global climate change has created dramatic new weather patterns, altered the migratory paths of birds, and shifted the habitats of disease-carrying organisms, opening the season on catastrophes we are ill-prepared to predict.

  "It's not a matter of 'maybe' anymore," my friend from D.C. told me over the phone. A professional photographer, she had been to New Orleans several months after Hurricane Katrina to document the grim demise of a piece of our nation we'd assumed to be permanent. "I'm starting to feel disaster as a real thing--that it's not if but when. And I feel helpless. When they say you should be keeping that much food on hand, all I can think to do is go to Costco and buy a bunch of cans! Can't I do better than that?" We made a date for the end of next tomato season: she would drive down for a girlfriend weekend and we could can stuff together. Tomato therapy.

  Our family hadn't been bracing for the sky to fall, but we now had the prescribed amount of food on hand. I felt thankful for our uncommon good luck. Or if not luck, then the following of our strange bliss through the labors it took to get us here, like the industrious ants of Aesop's fable working hard to prepare because it's their nature. Our luck was our proximity to land where food grows, and having the means to acquire it.

  Technically, most U.S. citizens are that lucky: well more than half live within striking distance of a farmers' market (some estimates put it at 70 percent), and most have the cash to buy some things beyond their next meal. One of those things could be a thirty-pound bag of tomatoes, purchased some Saturday in July and taken home to be turned into winter foods. Plenty of people have freezers that are humming away at this moment to chill, among other things, some cardboard. That space could be packed with some local zucchini and beans. Any garage or closet big enough for two months' worth of canned goods from Costco could stash, instead, some bushels of potatoes, onions, and apples, purchased cheaply in season. Even at the more upscale farmers' markets in the D.C. area, organic Yukon Gold potatoes run $2 a pound in late summer. A bushel costs about the same as dinner for four in a good restaurant, and lasts 2,800 times as long. Local onions and Ginger Gold apples at the same market cost less than the potatoes, and the same or less than their transported counterparts at a nearby Whole Foods.