Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

by Barbara Kingsolver

  From a biological perspective, the ultimate act of failure is to raise helpless kids. Not a parent I know who's worth the title wants to do that. But our operating system values Advanced Placement Comparative Politics, for example, way, way ahead of Knowing How to Make Your Own Lunch. Kids who can explain how supernovas are formed may not be allowed to get dirty in play group, and many teenagers who could construct and manage a Web site would starve if left alone on a working food farm. That's hardly their fault. We all may have some hungry months ahead of us, even hungry years, when a warmed-up globe changes the rules of a game we smugly thought we'd already aced. We might live to regret some of our SOL priorities. But the alumni of at least one Appalachian county's elementary schools will know how to grow their own pizzas, and I'm proud of them. If I could fit that on a bumper sticker, I would.

  Legislating Local

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  The epidemic of childhood obesity in the United States has incited parents, communities, and even legislators to improve kids' nutrition in one place they invariably eat: schools. Junk foods have been legally banned from many lunchrooms and school vending machines. But what will our nation's youth eat instead--fresh local produce? As if!

  Dude, it's going down. In 2004, in a National School Lunch Act amendment, Congress authorized a seed grant for the Farm to Cafeteria Program, promoting school garden projects and acquisition of local foods from small farms. The Local Produce Business Unit of the Department of Defense actually procures produce. Benefits of these programs, above and beyond the food, include agricultural education through gardening, farm visits, presentations by local farmers, and modest economic gains for the community. More than one-third of our states now have active farm-to-school programs; farm-to-college alliances are also growing.

  The USDA Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) has a Farmers' Market Nutrition Program for purchasing local food. It provides coupons good for fresh produce purchased from farms, farmers' markets, and roadside stands. In 2006, some $20 million in government funds provided these benefits to more than 2.5 million people.

  In a strong legislative move, Woodbury County, Iowa, mandated in 2006 that the county (subject to availability) "shall purchase...locally produced organic food when a department of Woodbury County serves food in the usual course of business." Even the prisons are serving local food, in a county that truly recognizes the value of community support.

  For more information visit www.foodsecurity.org and www.farmtoschool.org.

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  STEVEN L. HOPP

  My pupils in the turkey coop were not such quick studies. The first hen who'd come into season was getting no action from either of the two males, whom we had lately been calling Big Tom and Bad Tom. These guys had been fanning their tails in urgent mating display since last summer, more or less constantly, but they directed the brunt of their show-off efforts toward me, each other, or any sexy thing I might leave sitting around, such as a watering can. They really tried hard with the watering can. Lolita kept plopping herself down where they'd have to trip over her, but they only had eyes for some shiny little item. She sulked, and I didn't blame her. Who hasn't been there?

  I determined to set a more romantic scene, which meant escorting Lolita and one of the toms into their own honeymoon suite, a small private room inside the main barn, and removing any watering cans from his line of sight. She practically had to connect the dots for him--no bras to unhook, heaven be praised--but finally he started to get the picture. She crouched, he approached, and finally stopped quivering his tailfeathers to impress her. After all these many months, it took him a couple of beats to shift gears from "Get the babe! Get the babe!" to "O-oh yess!" Inch by inch he walked up onto her back. Then he turned around in circles several times, s-l-o-w-l-y, like the minute hand of a clock, before appearing to decide on the correct orientation. I was ready to hear the case for artificial insemination. But it looked now like he was giving it a go.

  The final important event after all this awkward foreplay is what bird scientists call the "cloacal kiss." A male bird doesn't have anything you would call "a member," or whatever you call it at your house. He just has an orifice, or cloaca, more or less the same equipment as the female except that semen is ejected from his, and eggs come out of hers later on. Those eggs will be fertile only if the two orifices have previously made the prescribed kind of well-timed contact.

  I watched, I don't mind saying. Come on, wouldn't you? Possibly you would not have stooped quite as low as I did for the better view, but geez, we don't get cable out here. And this truly was an extraordinary event, something that's nearly gone from our living world. For 99.9 percent of domestic turkeys, life begins in the syringe and remains sexless to the end. Few people alive have witnessed what I was about to see.

  Cloacal kiss is exactly the right name for it. The male really has to extend that orifice, like puckering up for a big smooch. Try to picture this, though: he's standing on her back, tromping steadily and clutching his lady so as not to fall off. The full complement of her long tailfeather fan lies between his equipment and hers. The pucker has to be heroic to get around all that. Robert Browning said it perfectly: Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a Heaven for?

  Paradise arrives when a fellow has kneaded his lady's erogenous wing zones for a long, long time with his feet, until she finally decides her suitor has worked himself up to the necessary fervor. Without warning, quick as an eyeblink, she flips up her tail feathers and reaches upward to meet him. Oh, my gosh! I gasped to see it.

  It was an air kiss.

  They really did miss. Mwah!--like a pair of divas onstage who don't want to muss their lipstick. (Not Britney and Madonna.) But rare is the perfect first attempt, I know as well as the next person who has ever been young.

  She wandered off, slightly dazed, to a corner of the dark little room. He stared after her, his feathers all slack for once in his life, divining that this was not the time to put on a tail-shaking show. He knit his caruncled brow and surely would have quoted Shakespeare if he'd had it in him: Trip no further, pretty sweeting; journeys end in lovers meeting...

  She pecked listlessly at some grain on the dirt floor. Probably she'd been hoping for better room service.

  What's to come is still unsure: in delay there lies no plenty. Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty, Youth's a stuff will not endure.

  I left them there, to love again on the morrow. Or maybe in fifteen minutes. After all, they were kids.

  Animal behaviorists refer to a mating phenomenon called the "Coolidge effect," a term deriving from an apocryphal story about the president and first lady. On an official visit to a government farm in Kentucky, they are said to have been impressed by a very industrious rooster. Mrs. Coolidge asked her guide how often the cockerel could be expected to perform his duty, and was informed: "Dozens of times a day."

  "Please tell that to the president," she said.

  The president, upon a moment's reflection, asked, "Was this with the same hen each time?"

  "Oh, no, Mr. President," the guide replied. "A different one each time."

  The president smiled. "Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge."

  Two weeks after our Lolita came down with lovesickness, the rest of the hens followed. Now we recognized the symptoms. Scientific as always in our barnyard, we applied the Coolidge effect, separating either Big Tom or Bad Tom with a new hen each day in the romantic barn room while the other tom chased the rest of the girls around the pasture. We had to keep the boys apart from one another, not so much because they fought (though they did), but because any time one of them managed to mount a hen, the other would charge like a bowling ball down the lane and topple the lovers most ungracefully, ka-pow. Nothing good was going to come of that.

  But after the February of Love dawned over our barnyard, it was followed by the March of the Turkey Eggs. We hoped this was good, although the first attempts looked like just one more wreck along the l
ove-train track. It's normal for a young bird to need a few tries, to get her oviduct work in order. But to be honest I didn't even recognize the first one as an egg. I went into the turkey coop to refill the grain bin and almost stepped on a weird thing on the floor. I stooped down to poke at it: a pale bag of fluid, soft to the touch, teardrop-shaped with a rubbery white corkscrew at the pointy end. Hmmm. A small visitor from another planet? I tentatively decided it was an egg, but did not uncork the champagne.

  Soon, real eggs followed: larger and more pointed than chickens' eggs, light brown with a cast of reddish freckles. I was thrilled with the first few. Then suddenly they were everywhere, dropped coyly on the floor like hankies: hither and yon about the coop, outside in the caged run, and even splat on the grass of the pasture. When the urge struck these girls, they delivered, like the unfortunate mothers one hears about having their babies in restaurant foyers and taxicabs.

  I had fashioned what I thought to be a respectable turkey nest on the floor in one corner of the coop, but no one was using it. Clearly it didn't look right to them, maybe not cozy enough. We built a big wooden box with open sides to set over the nest for protection. The turkeys roosted at night on high rafters inside their coop, and always flew around rambunctiously before going to bed. Bourbon Reds have wings and are not afraid to use them. Maybe the nest on the floor would have more appeal, I reasoned, if I made it safe from aerial assault.

  This struck some chord in the turkey psyche, but not the right one: the hens immediately began laying eggs on top of the plywood platform, about three feet off the ground. My reference book insisted turkeys will only use floor nests. My turkeys hadn't heard about that. Within days I had no more eggs on the floor, but nearly two dozen in a precarious clutch on a plywood platform where they could easily roll off and smash. I cut down the sides of a big cardboard box to make a shallow tray, filled it with straw and leaves, and put the eggs in there.

  Finally I'd guessed right. The sight of this cozy pile of eggs in a computer-monitor shipping carton was just what it took to throw the hormonal switch. One by one, the turkey hens began sitting on the nest. After a fashion. They would lay an egg, sit just a few minutes longer, and leave. Soon I had more than thirty eggs in this platform nest and no mother worth a corsage, to say the least.

  Most of them did try, a little. As time passed and the pile grew to ridiculous proportions, they seemed to feel some dim sense of obligation. A hen would sit on the eggs for an hour. Then she'd hop up, wander away, and go get a snack. Or she would land on the nest, lay one egg, tromp around on the pile until she'd broken two, then eat them and go bye-bye. Often two hens would sit on the eggs together, amiable for awhile until they'd begin to tussle with one another. Sometimes this would escalate until they were fanning their tail feathers and displaying at one another, exactly the way the males do. Then, suddenly, they'd quit and go do lunch together. I became hopeful when one hen (not always the same one) would stay on the eggs until late morning, when I usually let all the turkeys out into the pasture. She would stay behind as the sisters nattered out the door, but always after a while she would decide she'd had all she could take of that, and scream to be let out with her friends for the rest of the day.

  With all due respect for very young mothers who are devoted to their children, I began to think of my hens as teen moms of the more stereotypical kind. "I'm not ready to be tied down" was the general mindset. "Free bird" was the anthem. Nobody was worrying over this growing pile of eggs, except me. I fretted as they strolled away, scolding each slacker mother: You turkey! Dindon sauvage, pardon my French. You've made your nest, now sit on it.

  My nagging had the predictable effect, i.e. none. I felt bereft. Most nights were still below freezing. What could be more pitiful than a huge nest of beautiful eggs sitting out in the cold? Potentially viable, valuable eggs left to die. That many heirloom turkey eggs, purchased mail-order for incubation, would cost about three hundred dollars, and that is nothing compared with the real products of awkward, earnest turkey love. But what was I supposed to do, sit on them myself?

  That, essentially, is what the professionals do. Our feed store carried several models of incubators, which I'd scrutinized more than once. This would be the simple answer: put the eggs in an electric incubator, watch them hatch, and raise baby turkeys myself, one more time. Turkeys that would, once again, grow up wanting to mate with something like me.

  Is it possible to rear eggs in an incubator and slip them under a female adult after they've hatched? Easy answer: Yes, and she will kill them. Possibly eat them, as horrifying as that sounds. Motherhood is the largest work of most lives, and natural selection cannot favor a huge investment of energy in genes that are not one's own. It's straightforward math: the next generation will contain zero young from individuals whose genes let them make that choice. In animals other than humans, adoption exists only in rare and mostly accidental circumstances.

  In the case of turkeys, the mother's brain is programmed to memorize the sound of her chicks' peeping the moment they hatch. This communication cements her bond with her young, causing her to protect them intensely during their vulnerable early weeks, holding her wings out and crouching to keep the kids hidden under something like a feathery hoop-skirt, day and night, while they make brief forays out into the world, learning to find their own food.

  Early-twentieth-century experiments (awful ones to contemplate) showed that deafened mother turkeys were unable to get the all-important signal from their young. These mothers destroyed their own chicks, even after sitting on the eggs faithfully for weeks.

  My hens seemed to have good ears, but the faithful sitting was not their long suit. Still, I didn't buy an incubator. I wanted turkey chicks raised by turkey mothers, creatures that would literally know how to be true to their own kind. The project allows no shortcuts. If we could just get a first generation out of one of these mothers, the next ones would have both better genes and better rearing.

  The alternative possibility, a lot of botched hatchlings, made me sad. The temptation is to save the individual that pulls on your heartstrings, even at the cost of the breed. When I'd signed on to the small club of heritage animal breeders, part of the deal was refraining from this kind of sentimentality. Poor mothering instincts, runts, and genetic weaklings all have to be culled. In a human-centric world that increasingly (and wisely, in my opinion) defines all humans as intrinsically equal, it's hard not to color this thinking outside of the lines. But the rules for healthy domestic animal populations are entirely unlike those we apply to ourselves. I came up against this when trying to explain to my nephew why we can't let the white rooster mate with the brown hens. I decided to drop the subject for a few years. But I'll bring it up again if he asks, because it's important information: respect takes different forms for different species. The apple tree gains strength from strict breeding and regular pruning. So does the herd.

  Our purpose for keeping heritage animals is food-system security, but also something else that is less self-serving: the dignity of each breed's true and specific nature. A Gloucester Old Spots hog in the pasture, descended from her own ancient line, making choices, minute by minute, about rooting for grubs and nursing her young, contains in her life a sensate and intelligent "pigness." It's a state of animal grace that never even touches the sausages-on-hooves in an industrial pig lot. One can only hope they've lost any sense of the porcine dignities stolen from them.

  If it seems a stretch to use the word dignity in the same sentence with pig, or especially turkey, that really proves my point. It was never their plan to let stupid white eunuchs take over, it was ours, and now the genuine, self-propagating turkeys with astute mothering instincts are all but lost from the world. My Bourbon Reds and I had come through hard times together, and I was still rooting for them. They had grown up handsome and strong, disease free, good meat producers, efficient pasture foragers.

  I found myself deeply invested in the next step: I wanted them to make it to the next ge
neration on their own. Natural Childbirth or Bust. All my eggs were in one basket now. If they dropped it, we'd have pumpkin soup next Thanksgiving.

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  Taking Local On the Road

  BY CAMILLE

  I have a confession to make. Five months into my family's year of devoted local eating, I moved out. Not because the hours of canning tomatoes in early August drove me insane or because I was overcome by insatiable cravings for tropical fruit. I just went to college. It was a challenging life, getting through chemistry and calculus while adjusting to a whole new place, and the limited dining options I had as a student living on campus didn't help. I suppose I could have hoed up a personal vegetable patch on the quad or filled my dorm room with potted tomato and zucchini plants, but then people would really have made fun of me for being from Appalachia. Instead, I ate lettuce and cucumbers in January just like all the other kids.

  Living away from home, talking with my family over the phone, gave me some perspective. Not having fresh produce at my disposal made me realize how good it is. I also noticed that how I think about food is pretty unusual among my peers. When I perused the salad bar at my dining hall most evenings, grimly surveying the mealy, pinkish tomatoes and paperlike iceberg lettuce, I could pick out what probably came from South America or New Zealand. I always kept this information to myself (because who really cares when there are basketball games and frat parties to talk about?), but I couldn't help noticing it.

  I suppose my generation is farther removed from food production than any other, just one more step down the path of the American food industry. More than our parents, we rely on foods that come out of shiny wrappers instead of peels or skins. It still surprises a girl like me, who actually lives on a real farm with real animals and stuff growing out of the ground, that so many young adults couldn't guess where their food comes from, or when it's in season where they live. It's not that my rising generation is unintelligent or unworldly--my classmates are some of the smartest, most cultured people I know. But information about food and farming is not very available. Most of the people I know have never seen a working farm, or had any reason to do so. Living among people my age from various cities across the United States made me realize I actually know a lot about food production, and I don't take that for granted.