I also won't forget to appreciate how much better local food tastes. Next to getting a good night's sleep on a comfortable mattress, cooking good food became my main motivation for coming home from school to visit. Of course seeing my family was nice, but priorities are priorities, right? It was great after weeks of dorm life to eat eggs with deep golden yolks, and greens that still had their flavor and crunch. I loved being able to look at a table full of food and know where every vegetable was grown, where the meat lived when it was still a breathing animal.
During my first year of college I found two campus eateries that use organic, locally grown produce in their meals, and one that consistently uses free-range meat. For the most part, these vendors did not widely advertise the fact that they were participating in the local food economy. I only found out because I cared, and then tried to buy most of my food from those places.
My generation, I know, has the reputation of sticking iPods in our ears and declining to care about what might happen in ten years, or even next week. We can't yet afford hybrid vehicles or solar homes. But we do care about a lot of things, including what we eat. Food is something real. Living on the land that has grown my food gives me a sense of security I'm lucky to have. Feeling safe isn't so easy for people my age, who face odious threats like global warming, overpopulation, and chemical warfare in our future. But even as the world runs out of fuel and the ice caps melt, I will know the real sources of my sustenance. My college education may or may not land me a good job down the road, but my farm education will serve me. The choices I make now about my food will influence the rest of my life. If a lot of us felt this way, and started thinking carefully about our consumption habits just one meal at a time, we could affect the future of our planet. No matter how grave the predictions I hear about the future, for my peers and me, that's a fact that gives me hope.
* * *
20 * TIME BEGINS
Years ago, when Lily was not quite four, we were spending one of those perfect mother-daughter mornings in the flower garden: I planted pansies while she helped by picking up the bugs for closer looks, and not eating them at all. Three is a great age. She was asking a lot of questions about creature life, I remember, because that was the day she first worked up to the Big Question. I don't mean sex, that's easy. She wanted to know where everything comes from: beetles, plants, us. "How did dinosaurs get on the earth, and why did they go away?" was her reasonable starting point.
How lovely it might be to invoke for my child in just one or two quotes the inexplicable Mystery. But I went to graduate school in evolutionary biology, which kind of obligates me to go into the details. Lily and I talked about the millions and millions of years, the seaweeds and jellyfish and rabbits. I explained how most creatures have many children (some have thousands!) with lots of small differences between them. These specialties--things like quick hiding or slow, picky eating or just shoveling everything in--can make a difference in whether the baby lives to be a grown-up. The ones that survive will have children more like themselves. And so on. The group slowly changes.
I've always thought of this as a fine creation story, a sort of quantifiable miracle, and was pleased to think I'd rendered such a complex subject comprehensible to a toddler. She sat among the flowers, pondering it. At length she asked, "Mama, did you get born, or are you one of the ones that evolved from the tree primates?"
I'm not eight million years old. But I am old enough to know I should never, ever, trust I've explained anything perfectly. Some part of the audience will always remain at large, confused or plain unconvinced. As I wind up this account, I'm weighing that. Is it possible to explain the year we had? I can tell you we came to think of ourselves, in the best way, as a family of animals living in our habitat. Does that reveal the meaning of our passage? Does it explain how we're different now, even though we look the same? We are made of different stuff, with new connections to our place. We have a new relationship with the weather. So what, and who cares?
All stories, they say, begin in one of two ways: "A stranger came to town," or else, "I set out upon a journey." The rest is all just metaphor and simile. Your high school English teacher was right. In Moby-Dick, you'll know if you were half awake, the whale was not just an aquatic mammal. In our case, the heirloom turkeys are not just large birds but symbols of a precarious hold on a vanishing honesty. The chickens are secondary protagonists, the tomatoes are allegorical. The zucchini may be just zucchini.
We set out upon a journey. It seemed so ordinary on the face of things, to try to do what nearly all people used to do without a second thought. But the trip surprised us many times, because of all the ways a landscape can enter one's physical being. Like most of the other top-heavy hominids walking around in shoes, failing to notice the forest for the mashed trees reincarnated as our newspapers and such, I'd nearly forgotten the truest of all truths: we are what we eat.
As our edible calendar approached its arbitrary conclusion, we were more than normally conscious of how everything starts over in the springtime. All the milestones that had nudged us toward the start of our locavore year began to wink at us again. Our seedlings came up indoors. The mud-ice melted, and the spicebushes in the lane covered themselves with tiny yellow pompoms of flower. The tranquils bloomed. On April 3, the secretive asparagus began to nose up from its bed.
What were we doing when the day finally came? Standing by our empty chest freezer at midnight, gnawing our last frozen brick of sliced squash, watching the clock tick down the seconds till we could run out and buy Moon Pies? No. I'm sorry, but the truth is so undramatic, I can't even find "the day" in my journal.
The best I can do is recall a moment when I understood I had kept some promise to myself, having to do with learning to see the world differently. It was a day in early April when three little trees in our yard were covered with bloom--dark pink peach blossoms, pale pink plum, and white pear, filling the space like a Japanese watercolor. The air smelled spicy; the brown pasture had turned brilliant green. From where I stood on the front porch I could see my white-winged turkeys moving slowly through that emerald sea, nibbling as they went. I pictured how it would be in another month when the grass shot up knee-deep. I was struck, then, with a vivid fantasy of my family being in the turkeys' place, imagining what a thrill it would be to wander chest-deep in one's dinner as an ordinary routine. I mean to say I pictured us wading through piles of salad greens, breast-stroking into things like tomatoes, basil, and mozzarella.
I snapped out of it, recognizing this was not a very normal daydream. This was along the lines my astute children would diagnose as wackadoo. I took myself to be a woman changed by experience.
But I'd noticed the kids had changed too. One day at the farmer's market a vendor had warned us there might be some earworms in the corn because it was unsprayed. He pointed out a big one wriggling in the silks of one of the ears in our bag, and reached in to pluck it off. Lily politely held out her hand: that was our worm, we'd paid for it. She would take that protein to her chickens, and in time it would be eggs. Camille used similar logic to console me after my turkeys raided the garden and took some of the nicest tomatoes. "Mom," she said, "you'll eat them eventually." And I did.
It wasn't just our family, either, that had changed in a year. Food was now very much a subject of public conversation--not recipes, but issues. When we'd first dreamed up our project, we'd expected our hardest task would be to explain in the most basic terms what we were doing, and why on earth we'd bother. Now our local newspaper and national ones frequently had local-food feature stories on the same day. Every state had it going on, including Arizona, the food scene we feared we had left for dead. Alaska was experiencing a farmers' market boom, with the "Alaska Grown" logo showing up on cloth shopping bags all over Anchorage. Tod Murphy's Farmers Diner, in order to accommodate more diners, had relocated south to Quechee Village, Vermont (near Hanover, NH). Other like-minded eateries now lay in the path of many a road trip. Hundreds of people were sig
ning up online and reporting on their "Locavore Month" experiences. We had undertaken a life change partly as a reaction against living in a snappily-named-diet culture; now this lifestyle had its own snappy diet name: "The 100-Mile Diet Challenge!" What a shock. We were trendy.
As further proof that the movement had gained significance, local eating now had some official opposition. The standard criticisms of local food as Quixotic and elitist seemed to get louder, as more and more of us found it affordable and utterly doable. The Christian Science Monitor even ran a story on how so much local focus could breed "unhealthy provincialism." John Clark, a development specialist for (where else) the World Bank, argued that "what are sweatshop jobs for us may be a dream job" for someone else--presumably meaning those folks who earn a few dreamy bucks a day from Dole, Kraft, Unilever, or Archer Daniel Midlands--"but all that goes out the window if we only buy local." He expressed concern that local-food bias would lead to energy waste, as rabidly provincial consumers drove farmers in icy climes to grow bananas in hothouses.
That's some creative disapproval, all right--a sure sign the local-food movement was getting worrisome to food industrialists who had heretofore controlled consumer choices so handily, even when they damaged our kids' health and our neighborhoods. Shoppers were starting to show some backbone, clearly shifting certain preferences about what foods they purchased, and from where. An estimated 3 percent of the national supply of fresh produce had moved directly from farmers to customers that year.
The "why bother" part of the equation was also becoming obvious to more people. Global climate change had gone, in one year, from unmentionable to cover story. "The end of the oil economy" was now being discussed by some politicians and many economists, not just tree huggers and Idaho survivalists. We were starting to get it.
But it's also true what the strategists say about hearts and minds--you have to win them both. We will change our ways significantly as a nation not when some laws tell us we have to (remember Prohibition?), but when we want to. During my family's year of conscious food choices, the most important things we'd learned were all about that: the wanting to. Our fretful minds had started us on a project of abstinence from industrial food, but we finished it with our hearts. We were not counting down the days until the end, because we didn't want to go back.
A few days after my momentary chest-deep-in-food fantasy, we had dinner with our friends Sylvain and Cynthia. Sylvain grew up in the Loire Valley, where local food is edible patriotism, and I sensed a kindred spirit from the way he celebrated every bite of our salad, inhaling the spice of the cut radishes and arugula. He told us that in India it's sometimes considered a purification ritual to go home and spend a year eating everything from one place--ideally, even to grow it yourself. I liked this name for what we had done: a purification ritual, to cultivate health and gratitude. It sounds so much better than wackadoo.
The Blind Leading the Blind
* * *
Critics of local food suggest that it's naive or elitist, whereas industrial agriculture is for everybody: it's what's for dinner, all about feeding the world. "Genetically modified, industrially produced monocultural corn," wrote Steven Shapin in the New Yorker, "is what feeds the victims of an African famine, not the gorgeous organic technicolor Swiss chard from your local farmers' market."
The big guys have so completely taken over the rules of the game, it's hard to see how food systems really work, but this criticism hits the nail right on the pointy end: it's perfectly backward. One of industrial agriculture's latest feed-the-hungry schemes offers a good example of why that's so. Exhibit A: "golden rice." It's a genetically modified variety of rice that contains beta-carotene in the kernel. (All other parts of the rice plant already contain it, but not the grain after it is milled.) The developers of this biotechnology say they will donate the seeds--with some strings attached--to Third World farmers. It's an important public relations point because the human body converts beta-carotene to vitamin A; a deficiency of that vitamin affects millions of children, especially in Asia, causing half a million of them every year to go blind. GM rice is the food industry's proposed solution.
But most of the world's malnourished children live in countries that already produce surplus food. We have no reason to believe they would have better access to this special new grain. Golden rice is one more attempt at a monoculture solution to nutritional problems that have been caused by monocultures and disappearing diversity. In India alone, farmers have traditionally grown over 200 types of greens, and gathered many more wild ones from the countryside. Every single one is a good source of beta-carotene. So are fruits and vegetables. Further, vitamin A delivered in a rice kernel may not even help a malnourished child, because it can't be absorbed well in isolation from other nutrients. Throwing more rice at the problem of disappearing dietary diversity is a blind approach to the problem of blindness. "Naive" might describe a person who believes agribusinesses develop their heavily patented commodity crops in order to feed the poor. (Golden rice, alone, has seventy patents on it.) Technicolor chard and its relatives growing in village gardens--that's a solution for realists.
* * *
STEVEN L. HOPP
Over the years since I first acquired children and a job, I've often made reference to the concern of "keeping my family fed." I meant this in the same symbolic way I'd previously used (pre-kids, pre-respectable job) to speak of something "costing a lot of bread." I was really talking about money. Now when I say bread, I mean bread. I find that food is not symbolic of anything so much as it is real stuff: beetroot as neighbor to my shoe, chicken as sometime companion. I once read a pioneer diary in which the Kansas wife postponed, week after week, harvesting the last hen in her barren, windy yard. "We need the food badly," she wrote, "but I will miss the company."
I have never been anywhere near that lonely, but now I can relate to the relationship. When I pick apples, I miss the way they looked on the tree. Eggplants look like lightbulbs on the plant, especially the white and neon purple ones, and I observe the unplugging of their light when I toss them in the basket. My turkey hens have names now. I do know better, but couldn't help myself.
At the end of March, one of my turkey mothers found her calling. She sat down on the platform nest and didn't get up again for a week. Then two, then three. This was Lolita, the would-be husband-stealer--the hen who had been first to show mating behaviors, and then to lay eggs. Now she was the first to begin sitting with dedication. We expunged "Lolita" from her record and dubbed her "Number One Mother."
Underneath the platform where she now sat earning that title, we fixed up two more nests to contain the overflow. Together the hens had now produced more than fifty eggs. While Number One Mother incubated about two dozen of them, Numbers Two, Three, and Four were showing vague interest in the other piles. Number Two had started to spend the nights sitting on eggs, but still had better things to do in the daytime. Three and Four were using the remaining nest the way families use a time-share condo in Florida.
But something inside the downy breast of Number One had switched on. Once she settled in, I never saw her get up again, not even for a quick drink of water. With her head flattened against her body and a faraway look in her eyes, she gave herself over to maternity. I began bringing her handfuls of grain and cups of water that she slurped with desperation. I apologized for everything I'd said to her earlier.
I was the free bird now, out in the sunshine as much as possible, walking into the open-armed embrace of springtime. A balmy precipitation of cherry petals swirled around us as we did our garden chores. The ruddy fiddleheads of peony leaves rolled up out of the ground. The birthday garden made up of gift plants I'd received last year now surprised me like a series of unexpected phone calls: the irises bloomed; the blue fountain grass poured over the rocks; I found the yellow lady's slipper blossoms when I was weeding under the maple. One friend had given me fifty tulip bulbs, one for each of my years, which we planted in a long trail down the drivew
ay. Now they were popping up with flaming red heads on slender stalks like candles on a birthday cake. The groundhog that dug up some bulbs over the winter had taken a few years off. I would try to remain grateful to the groundhog later on, when he was eating my beans.
Spring is made of solid, fourteen-karat gratitude, the reward for the long wait. Every religious tradition from the northern hemisphere honors some form of April hallelujah, for this is the season of exquisite redemption, a slam-bang return to joy after a season of cold second thoughts. Our personal hallelujah was the return of good, fresh food. Nobody in our household was dying for a Moon Pie, but we'd missed crisp things, more than we'd realized. Starting the cycle again was a heady prospect: cutting asparagus, hunting morels, harvesting tender spinach and chard. We'd made it.
Did our year go the way we'd expected? It's hard to say. We weren't thinking every minute about food, as our family life was occupied front and center by so many other things. Devastating illnesses had darkened several doors in our close family. We'd sent a daughter off to college and missed her company, and her cooking. If our special way of eating had seemed imposing at first, gradually it was just dinner, the spontaneous background of family time as we met our fortunes one day, one phone call, one hospital visit, wedding, funeral, spelling bee, and birthday party at a time. It caused us to take more notice of food traditions of all kinds--the candy-driven school discipline program, the overwhelming brace of covered dishes that attend a death in the family. But in the main, our banana-free life was now just our life. So much so, in fact, I sometimes found myself a bit startled to run across things like bananas in other people's kitchens--like discovering a pair of Manolo Blahnik sandals in the lettuce bed. Very nice I'm sure, just a little bit extravagant for our kind.
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life Page 37
