Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

by Barbara Kingsolver

  Tying my family's nutritional fortunes to the seasons did not really involve any risk for us, of course. But it did acquaint us in new ways with what seasons mean, and how they matter. The subtle downward pulse of temperatures and day lengths created a physical rhythm in our lives, with beats and rests: long muscles, long light; shorter days, shorter work, and cold that drew us deeper into thoughts and plans, under plaster ceilings instead of an open sky. I watched the rank-and-file jars in our pantry decline from army to platoon, and finally to lonely sentries staggered along the shelves. We weren't rationing yet, but I couldn't help counting the weeks until our first spring harvests and the happy reopening day of the farmers' market. I had a vision of our neighbors saying of us, "Well, they're still with us after the winter."

  In late February, official end of "Hungry Month," I was ready to believe we and all our animals had come through the lean times unscathed. And then one of our turkey hens took to standing around looking droopy. She let her wings drop to the ground instead of folding them on her back in normal turkey fashion. Her shoulders hunched and her head jutted forward, giving her a Nixonesque air--minus the eyebrows and crafty agenda. This girl just looked dazed.

  Oh, no, I thought. Here we go. Farm animals lucky enough to live on pasture must deal with winter eventually, and health challenges similar to those faced by people in previous generations: less fresh air, more indoor congregation and risk of contagion, and the trial of surviving on stored hay or grain instead of fresh greens and hunted protein. In the realm of contagious maladies, poultry husbandry is notoriously challenging. And turkeys are even more disease-prone than chickens. "You never see it coming," a turkey-experienced friend of mine had warned when we first got our poults. "One day they're walking around looking fine. Next thing you know, drop-dead Fred!" The list of afflictions that can strike down a turkey would excite any hypochondriac: blackhead roundworm, crop bind, coccidiosis, paratyphoid, pullorum disease, and many more. In one of my poultry handbooks, the turkey chapter is subtitled, "A Dickens to Raise."

  So far, though, my turkeys had stayed hale and hearty and I'd taken all the doom-saying with a grain of salt. Virtually all turkey-info sources in existence (including my friend with her drop-dead Freds) refer to the Broad-Breasted White, the standard factory-farm turkey that's also the choice of most hobby farmers and 4-H projects, simply because the alternatives aren't well known. My heirloom Bourbon Reds were a different bird, not bred for sluggardly indoor fattening but for scrappy survival in the great outdoors. They retain a genetic constitution for foraging, flying, mating, and--I hoped--resisting germs.

  Even so, my goal of keeping these birds alive through the winter and into their second year for breeding was statistically audacious. The longer a bird is kept, the greater its chances of being overwhelmed by pathogens. The great majority of modern turkeys can expect an earthly duration of only four months before meeting their processor. Free-range turkeys may take as long as six months to reach slaughter size. But any bird that lives past its first Thanksgiving inhabits a domain occupied by fewer than one-half of one percent of domestic turkeys. At nine months, my flock had now entered that elite age bracket, among the oldest living turkeys in America. When I undertook to keep a naturally breeding flock, I hadn't thought much about what I was up against.

  Nor did I have any clue, now, which possible turkey ailment my poor droopy hen might have. The drear blackhead roundworm topped my worry list, since its inventory of symptoms began with "droopy aspect," proceeding from there into "aspects" too unpleasant to mention. I immediately removed Miss Droop from the rest of the flock, assuming she'd be contagious. I've had kids in preschool--I know that much. I ushered her out of the big outdoor pen attached to the poultry house, and escorted her several hundred yards into an isolation room in the cellar of our big barn. Yes, it's the same one where we sequester the death-row roosters; I didn't discuss that with her.

  In fact, when I shut her in there by herself she immediately perked up, raising her head and folding her wings onto her back, shaking her fluffed feathers neatly back into place, looking around brightly for what she might find to do next. I hardly trusted this miracle recovery, but an hour later when I came back to check on her she was still perky and now calling desperately for her friends. (Turkey hens hate being alone.) I decided I must have worried the whole thing out of thin air.

  I led her back up to the turkey pen. She walked into the midst of her brethren, heaved a great turkey sigh, and drooped back down again: head hunched, wings dragging the ground. Okay, I wasn't imagining it, she really had something. I shepherded her back out and down to the barn again. And once again, watched in astonishment as she lifted her head brightly and began to walk around, looking for something to eat.

  I stared at her. "Are you goldbricking?" I demanded.

  It was a sunny Saturday, our first little sneak preview of spring. Steven was down in the new orchard working on the fence. I decided my poultry patient could use a mental health day. I let her out of the barn and we walked together down the road toward the orchard. She could get some sunshine and fresh greens, and I'd see if Steven needed help with the fence. He saw us coming down the lane together, and laughed. Turkey herders are not a respected class of people.

  "She needs some fresh pasture," I said defensively. "She has some kind of droopy sickness."

  "She looks fine," he said (which was maddeningly true), and went back to the fence that's meant to discourage deer from eating our young pear orchard. For a few minutes I watched Ms. Turkey happily foraging among the trees, pecking at seed heads, alerting to any small movement of insects among the clumps of grass. She seemed as healthy as the day she was born. Some of our trees, on the other hand, showed signs of deer damage. I inspected them closely and considered going back up to the shed to get the lop shears. This winter day would be a good time for pruning the fruit trees.

  Steven yelled, "Hey, knock it off!"

  I looked up to see he wasn't talking to me. My charge had wandered over to him, approaching from behind and reaching up with her beak to give his jacket a good tug, issuing a turkey mandative I would translate as: Hey, look at me!

  He nudged her away, but she persisted. After several more tugs, he turned to face her directly, planted his feet, and made a very manly sort of huff. On that cue she coyly turned her tail toward him, jutted her neck, and dropped her wings to the ground.

  Oh, my goodness. It wasn't Hey, look at me. It was Hey, sailor, new in town? That's what she had: love sickness. Steven shot me a look I will not translate here.

  "Stop that," I yelled. "He is so not your type!" I ran to interrupt her, in case she meant to move their relationship to the next level.

  Poor thing, how would she know? She was raised by humans, with no opportunity to imprint on adult turkeys of either gender or observe proper turkey relations. As far as she knew, I was her mother. It's only logical that the person I married would strike her as a good catch.

  As quickly as possible I ushered her back to the turkey pen, putting the kibosh on her plot to win away my husband. But now what? We'd kept two males and six females for breeding purposes, with no real logic behind this number beyond a hope that we'd still have enough, in case we lost any birds over the winter. Were they now all about to come into season? Would our two toms suddenly wake up and start killing each other over this droopy Lolita? And what about the other hens? Who needed to be separated from whom, for how long? Would every hen need her own nest, and if so, what would it look like?

  I had assumed I'd cross all these bridges when I came to them. I remember harboring exactly this kind of unauthorized confidence before I had my first baby, also, only to look back eventually upon my ignorance and bang my head with the flat of my hand. Now, suddenly, long before I'd ever expected any shenanigans, like parents of turkey teens everywhere, I was caught by surprise. They're too young for this, it's only February! I went indoors to check our farm library for anything I could find about turkey mating behavior.
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  I spent way too much of a beautiful day inside, on the floor, with books stacked all around me. Our poultry husbandry manuals contained a total of nothing about turkey sex. I kept looking, checking indices for various barnyard euphemisms: nothing. Honestly, our kids' bookshelves had over the years been furnished with more literature in the "Now That You're Growing Up" department. You'd think some turkey fundamentalists had been in here burning books.

  The real problem, of course, was that I was looking for a category of information nobody has needed for decades. The whole birds-and-bees business has been bred out of turkeys completely, so this complex piece of former animal behavior is now of no concern to anyone. Large-scale turkey hatcheries artificially inseminate their breeding stock. They extract the eggs in a similarly sterile manner and roll them into incubators, where electric warmth and automatic egg-turning devices stand in for motherhood. For the farmers who acquire and raise these hatchlings, the story is even simpler: fatten them as quickly as possible to slaughter size, then off with their heads. That's it. Poultry handbooks don't go into mating behavior because turkey mating has gone the way of rubberized foundation garments and the drive-in movie.

  To restore some old-fashioned sex to our farm, I was going to have to scour my sources for some decent sex ed. The Internet was no more help. A search for "turkey mating" scored 670,000 hits, mostly along the lines of this lively dispatch from the Missouri Department of Conservation: "More excitement this week--hunters statewide will find gobblers more responsive to calls! The key to success is sounding like a lovesick turkey hen."

  I already had a lovesick turkey hen, no need to fake that one. I tried limiting my search to domestic turkeys rather than wild ones. I still got thousands of hits, but not one shred of fact about turkey hokey-pokey. I did learn that the bright blue-and-pink growths on a male turkey's neck are called his "caruncle." I learned that the name "turkey" for this solely North American bird comes from a 400-year-old geographic mistake made by the English. I learned that the French know this bird as a dindon sauvage. That is when I fled from the electronic library, returning to my limited but reassuring paper pages where I could feel safe from the random onslaught of savage ding-dongs.

  Finally there I hit pay dirt. My spouse has a weakness for antique natural history books. His collection of old volumes covers the gamut from Piaget and Audubon to William J. Long, an early-twentieth-century ethologist who attributed animal communications to a telepathic force he called "chumfo." You may gather that I was desperate, to be plumbing these depths for help around the farm. But I found a thick tome by E. S. E. Hafez called The Behavior of Domestic Animals. Published mid-twentieth century, it's probably the most modern entry in Steven's collection, but for my purposes that was exactly the right era: animal science had advanced beyond chumfo, but had not yet taken the tomfoolery out of the toms.

  What caught my eye as I flipped through the book was a photograph with this caption: "Female turkey giving the sexual crouch to man..." Bingo! The text confirmed my worst suspicions: turkeys who had imprinted on humans, as hatchlings, would be prone to batting for the hominid team. But given the chance, the book said, they would likely be open-minded about turkey partners as well.

  Oh, good! Reading on, I learned that the characteristic droopy "crouch" is the first sign of sexual receptiveness in girl turkeys. Soon we could expect to see a more extended courtship interaction that would include stomping (boy), deeper crouch (girl), then mounting and much treading around as the male manipulated the female's "erogenous area along the sides of the body," followed by the complicated "copulatory sequence." Domestic turkeys are promiscuous, I learned, with no inclination toward pair bonding. Egg laying would begin in about two weeks. A turkey hen's instinct for sitting on the nest to brood the eggs, if that happened, would be triggered when enough of them accumulated in the nest. The magic number was somewhere between twelve and seventeen eggs.

  Eggs and nest were all theoretical at this point, but what concerned me most was the broody instinct getting switched on. These mothering instincts have been bred out of turkeys. For confinement birds the discouragement has been purposeful, and even heirloom breeds are mostly sold by hatcheries that incubate mechanically, so nobody is selecting for good maternal behaviors. Genes get passed on without regard for broody or nonbroody behavior. If anything, it's probably a bother to hatchery operations when a mother gets possessive about her young.

  If I wanted to raise turkeys the natural way, I understood now that I was signing up for a strong possibility of failure, not to mention a deep involvement in the sexual antics of a domestic bird. My interests weren't prurient (though you may come to doubt this later in the chapter). As a biologist and a PTA member, I have a healthy respect for the complex parameters of motherhood. The longer I think about a food industry organized around an animal that cannot reproduce itself without technical assistance, the more I mistrust it. Poultry, a significant part of the modern diet, is emblematic of the whole dirty deal. Having no self-sustaining bloodlines to back up the industry is like having no gold standard to underpin paper currency. Maintaining a naturally breeding poultry flock is a rebellion, at the most basic level, against the wholly artificial nature of how foods are produced.

  I was the rebel, that was my cause. I had more than just sentimental reasons for wanting to see my turkey hens brood and hatch their own babies, however unlikely that might be. I plowed on through my antique reference for more details on nesting and brooding, and what I might do to be a helpful midwife, other than boiling water or putting a knife under the bed. My new turkeysex manual got better and better. "Male turkeys," I read, "can be forced to broodiness by first being made drowsy, e.g. by an ample dose of brandy, and then being put on a nest with eggs. After recovery from the hangover, broodiness is established. This method was used extensively by farmers in Europe before incubators were available."

  I don't think of myself as the type to ply turkey menfolk with brandy and hoodwink them into fatherhood. But a girl needs to know her options.

  Six quarts of spaghetti sauce, four jars of dried tomatoes, four onions, one head of garlic at the end of a long, skinny, empty braid--and weeks to go. January is widely held to be the bugbear of local food, but the hungriest month is March, if you plan to see this thing through. Your stores are dwindling, your potatoes are sending pale feelers out into the void, but for most of us there is nothing new under the sun of muddy March, however it might intend to go out like a lamb. A few spring wildflowers, maybe, but no real eats. Our family was getting down to the bottom of our barrel.

  Which was a good thing for the chest freezer. I know people who layer stuff in there year after year, leaving it to future archaeologists, I gather, to read the good and bad green-bean years like tree rings. I've taken microbiology, and honestly, ick. I'm pretty fanatical about emptying the freezer completely before starting over. A quick inventory found our frozen beans long gone, but we still had sliced apples, corn, one whole turkey, and some smoked eggplant from last fall. Also plenty of zucchini, quelle surprise. We would not be the Crayola Family, then, but the one that survived on zucchini pie. Pretty cushy, as harrowing adventures go.

  Maybe March doesn't get such a bad rap because it doesn't feel hungry. If it's not the end of winter, you can see it from here. Lily and I were now starting our vegetable and flower seeds indoors, puttering in earnest under the fluorescent lights of our homemade seedling shelves. She had given up all hope of further snow days. And one fine afternoon she bounced off the bus with the news that the fourth-graders were going to study gardening at school. For a kid like Lily, this was an unbelievable turn of events: Now, children, we are going to begin a unit on recess!

  It wasn't just the fourth-graders, as it turned out. The whole school was that lucky, along with three other elementary schools in our county. School garden programs have lately begun showing up in schools from the trend-setting Bay Area to working-class Durham, North Carolina. Alice Waters founded the Berkeley programs, de
veloping a curriculum that teaches kids, alongside their math and reading, how to plant gardens, prepare their own school lunches, and sit down to eat them together in a civil manner. She has provided inspiration nationwide for getting fresh-grown food into cafeterias.

  But most of the garden-learning programs scattered through our country's schools have been created independently, as ours was. A local nonprofit helps support it, the school system has been cooperative, but our Learning Landscapes curriculum is the dream and full-time project of a green-thumbed angel named Deni. She helps the kindergartners grow popcorn and plant a rainbow of flowers to learn their colors. Second-graders make a special garden for hummingbirds, bees, and butterflies, while learning about pollination. Third-graders grow a pizza garden that covers the plant kingdom. Lily's class was starting seeds they planned to set out in a colonial herb garden, giving some life to their Virginia history lessons. Each grade's program is tied to concrete objectives the kids must know in order to pass their state-mandated testing.

  Virtually everyone I know in the school system feels oppressed by these testing regimes hanging over everything. Teachers sense them as huge black clouds on the horizon of April. For the kids it's more like a permanent threat of air attack. In our state--no kidding--they are called Standards of Learning, or "SOLs." (I don't think anyone intended the joke.) But Learning Landscapes works because it gets kids outdoors studying for tests while believing they are just playing in dirt.

  Deni knows how to get the approval of a school board, but she has a larger game plan for these kids than just passing the next exam. "One of the key things gardens can teach students is respect: for themselves, for others, and the environment," she says. "It helps future generations gain an understanding of our food system, our forests, our water and air, and how these things are all connected."