Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

by Barbara Kingsolver

  We pressed ourselves to pronounce some verdicts on our year. Our planning and putting-by for the winter had passed muster, as we still had pesto and vegetables in our freezer to last comfortably till the abundances of June. We'd overplanted squash, could have used more garlic, but had enough of everything to stay happy. The Web site of the local-eating Vancouver couple said they'd ended their year fifteen pounds lighter (despite what they described as "a lot of potatoes"), whereas we all weighed out of the year right about where we'd weighed in, and hoped to remain--except for Lily, who had gained twelve pounds and grown nearly five inches. Obviously we never went hungry, and you can't raise that much good kid on potatoes alone. The Canadians had been purists, though, and really we weren't; we'd maintained those emergency rations of mac-and-cheese. (And anyone giving up coffee gets a medal we weren't even in the running for.) But frankly, any year in which no high-fructose corn syrup crosses my threshold is pure enough for me.

  Our plan to make everything from scratch had pushed us into a lot of great learning experiences. In some cases, what we learned was that it was too much trouble for everyday: homemade pasta really is better, but we will always buy it most of the time, and save the big pasta-cranking events for dinner parties. Hard cheeses are hard. I never did try the French-class mayonnaise recipe. I'd also imagined at some irrational moment that I would learn to make apple cider and vinegar, but happily submitted to realism when I located professionals nearby doing these things really well. On the other hand, making our daily bread, soft cheeses, and yogurt had become so routine we now prepared them in minutes, without a recipe.

  Altered routines were really the heart of what we'd gained. We'd learned that many aisles of our supermarket offered us nothing local, so we didn't even push our carts down those: frozen foods, canned goods, soft drinks (yes, that's a whole aisle). Just grab the Virginia dairy products and organic flour and get out, was our motto, before you start coveting thy neighbor's goods. A person can completely forget about lemons and kiwis once the near occasion is removed.

  As successful as our sleuthing into local markets had been, we never did find good local wheat products, or seafood. I was definitely looking forward to some nonlocal splurges in the coming months: wild-caught Alaskan salmon and bay scallops and portobellos, hooray. In moderation, of course. I had a much better sense of my options now and could try for balance, buying one bottle of Virginia wine, for example, for every import.

  The biggest shock of our year came when we added up the tab. We'd fed ourselves, organically and pretty splendidly we thought, on about fifty cents per family member, per meal--probably less than I spent in the years when I qualified for food stamps. Of course, I now had the luxury of land for growing food to supplement our purchases. But it wasn't a lot of land: 3,524 square feet of tilled beds gave us all our produce--that's a forty-by-twenty-two-foot spread, per person. (It felt a lot bigger when we were weeding it.) We appreciate our farm's wooded mountainsides for hiking and the rare morel foray--and for our household water supply--but in the main, one doesn't eat a nature preserve. Adding up the land occupied by our fruit trees, berry bushes, and the pasture grazed by our poultry brings our land-use total for nutritional support to about a quarter acre--still a modest allotment. Our main off-farm purchases for the year were organic grain for animal feed, and the 300 pounds of flour required for our daily bread. To put this in perspective, a good wheat field yields 1,600 pounds of flour per acre. In total, for our grain and flour, pastured meats and goods from the farmers' market, and our own produce, our family's food footprint for the year was probably around one acre.

  By contrast, current nutritional consumption in the U.S. requires an average of 1.2 cultivated acres for every citizen--4.8 acres for a family of four. (Among other things, it takes space to grow corn syrup for that hypothetical family's 219 gallons of soda.) These estimates become more meaningful when placed next to another prediction: in 2050, the amount of U.S. farmland available per citizen will be only 0.6 acres. By the numbers, the hypothetical family has change in the cards. By any measure, ours had discovered a way of eating that was more resourceful than I ever could have predicted.

  In the coming year, I decided, I would plant fewer tomatoes, and more flowers. If we didn't have quite such a big garden, if we took a vacation to the beach this summer, we'd do that thanks to our friends at the farmers' market. The point of being dedicated locavores for some prescribed length of time, I now understand, is to internalize a trust in one's own foodshed. It's natural to get panicky right off the bat, freaking out about January and salad, thinking we could never ever do it. But we did. Without rationing, skipping a meal, buying a corn-fed Midwesternburger or breaking our vows of exclusivity with local produce, we lived inside our own territory for one good year of food life.

  "I can't exactly explain what we're looking for," I told our guests, feeling like a perfectly idiotic guide. "Your eye kind of has to learn for itself."

  We were back on Old Charley's Lot, scanning the dry-leaf-colored ground for dry-leaf-colored mushrooms. Steven found the first patch, a trio tilted at coy angles like garden gnomes. We all stood staring, trying to fix our vision. The color, the shape, the size, everything about a morel resembles a curled leaf lying on the ground among a million of its kind. Even so, the brain perceives, dimly at first and then, after practice, with a weirdly trenchant efficiency. You spot them before you know you've seen them.

  This was the original human vocation: finding food on the ground. We're wired for it. It's hard to stop, too. Our friends Joan and Jesse had traveled a long way that day, and their idea of the perfect host might not be a Scoutmaster type who makes you climb all over a slick, pathless mountainside with cat briars ripping your legs. But they didn't complain, even as rain began to spit on our jackets and we climbed through another maze of wild grapevines and mossy logs. "We could go back now," I kept saying. They insisted we keep looking.

  After the first half hour we grew quiet, concentrating on the ground, giving each other space for our own finds. It was a rare sort of afternoon. The wood thrushes and warblers, normally quiet once the sun gets a good foothold, kept blurting out occasional pieces of song, tricked into a morning mood by the cool, sunless sky. Pileated woodpeckers pitched ideas to one another in their secret talking-drum language. These giant, flamboyant woodpeckers are plentiful in our woods. We all took note of their presence, and were drawn out of our silence to comment on the remarkable news about their even more gigantic first cousins, the ivorybilled woodpeckers. These magnificent creatures, the "Lord God Birds" as they used to be called in the South, had been presumed extinct for half a century. Now a reputable research team had made an unbelievable but well-documented announcement. Ivorybills were still alive, deep in a swamp in Arkansas. Lord God.

  Was it true? A mistake or a hoax? Was it just one bird, or a few, maybe even enough for the species to survive? These were still open questions, but they were headliner questions, inspiring chat rooms and T-shirts and a whole new tourist industry in swampy Arkansas. People who never gave a hoot about birds before cared about this one. It was a miracle, capturing our hopes. We so want to believe it's possible to come back from our saddest mistakes, and have another chance.

  "How do you encourage people to keep their hope," Joan asked, "but not their complacency?" She was deeply involved that spring in producing a film about global climate change, and preoccupied with striking this balance. The truth is so horrific: we are marching ourselves to the maw of our own extinction. An audience that doesn't really get that will amble out of the theater unmoved, go home and change nothing. But an audience that does get it may be so terrified they'll feel doomed already. They might walk out looking paler, but still do nothing. How is it possible to inspire an appropriately repentant stance toward a planet that is really, really upset?

  I was as stumped on the answer to that as I'd been earlier on the mushroom guidance. However much we despise the monstrous serial killer called global warming, it's hard
to bring charges. We cherish our fossil-fuel-driven conveniences, such as the computer I am using to write these words. We can't exactly name-call this problem, or vote it away. The cure involves reaching down into ourselves and pulling out a new kind of person. The practical problem, of course, is how to do that. It's impossible to become a fuel purist, and it seems like failure to change our ways only halfway, or a pathetic 10 percent. So why even try? When the scope of the problem seems insuperable, isn't it reasonable just to call this one, give it up, and get on with life as we know it?

  I do know the answer to that one: that's called child abuse. When my teenager worries that her generation won't be able to fix this problem, I have to admit to her that it won't be up to her generation. It's up to mine. This is a now-or-never kind of project.

  But a project, nevertheless. Global-scale alteration from pollution didn't happen when human societies started using a little bit of fossil fuel. It happened after unrestrained growth, irresponsible management, and a cultural refusal to assign any moral value to excessive consumption. Those habits can be reformed. They have been reformed: several times in the last century we've learned that some of our favorite things like DDT and the propellants in aerosol cans were rapidly unraveling the structure and substance of our biosphere. We gave them up, and reversed the threats. Now the reforms required of us are more systematic, and nobody seems to want to go first. (To be more precise, the U.S.A. wants to go last.) Personally, I can't figure out how to give up my computer, but I'm trying to get myself onto a grid fueled by wind and hydro power instead of strip-mined coal. I could even see sticking some of the new thin-film photovoltaic panels onto our roof, and I'm looking for a few good congressmen or-women who'd give us a tax credit for that. In our community and our household we now have options we didn't know about five years ago: hybrid vehicles, geothermal heating. And I refused to believe a fuel-driven food industry was the only hand that could feed my family. It felt good to be right about that.

  I share with almost every adult I know this crazy quilt of optimism and worries, feeling locked into certain habits but keen to change them in the right direction. And the tendency to feel like a jerk for falling short of absolute conversion. I'm not sure why. If a friend had a coronary scare and finally started exercising three days a week, who would hound him about the other four days? It's the worst of bad manners--and self-protection, I think, in a nervously cynical society--to ridicule the small gesture. These earnest efforts might just get us past the train-wreck of the daily news, or the anguish of standing behind a child, looking with her at the road ahead, searching out redemption where we can find it: recycling or carpooling or growing a garden or saving a species or something. Small, stepwise changes in personal habits aren't trivial. Ultimately they will, or won't, add up to having been the thing that mattered.

  We all went crazy over finding the ivorybill because he is the Lord God's own redheaded whopper of a second chance. Something can happen for us, it seems, or through us, that will stop this earthly unraveling and start the clock over. Like every creature on earth, we want to make it too. We want more time.

  Natural cycles persist in being predictable, despite all human caprice. It probably happened by the grace of biology, rather than magic, that the very date Lily had circled on her calendar one year earlier got circled now on mine, for the same reason. When Number One Mother sat down on her clutch of eggs, I'd made note of it in my journal. Now I counted forward like expectant mothers everywhere: My babies due!

  I was on pins and needles, watching the date approach. Having done it myself twice, I knew the expectant-mother gig: focus, summon strength for the task at hand. But now I found myself in a role more along the lines of expectant dad: dither uselessly. I could do absolutely nothing to help, which increased my need to hover.

  On the actual due date I walked down to the poultry barn to check on Mom. Maybe, oh, about sixteen times. She raised her hackles and hissed at me to go away. This was a whole different demeanor from her glassy-eyed hunker of yesterday and the twenty-six days previous. I took her fussy defensiveness to be a good sign. Chicks begin peeping from inside the egg a day or so before they hatch. This mother must be hearing that, I thought, getting ready for the blessed event.

  The outcome of Sunday, April 23, however, was a big nothing. Monday brought more of the same. Has any anxious person ever really respected the warning about watched pots that never boil? Well, good for you, is all I can say, because I checked that nest morning, noon, and night, hoping for little fluffy chicks that did not appear. After all we'd been through together, Number One and I, what if nothing hatched at all?

  On Tuesday I went back through my journal and recalculated the due date, thinking I might be off by a day. I wasn't. They would hatch by the end of Tuesday then, I concluded reasonably, and they did not. That night I double-checked my reference books, which all agreed the incubation period for domestic turkey eggs is "about 27 days." What does about mean? Twenty-nine? Forty? On Wednesday I checked on the poor mother until she was visibly fed up. I even poked my hand under her to feel the eggs. She stuck tightly to the nest, but became so accustomed to my prodding that she began to ignore me rather than hissing. Possibly she was slumping into post-due-date despair.

  Looking for Mr. Goodvegetable

  * * *

  How small is a small farm? How nearby does local have to be? Is organic more important than local? Which of these should we favor, and when?

  Eco-gastronomy isn't just a minimum-distance food-buying contest. The three basic components of responsible eating are to favor food grown in an environmentally responsible way, delivered with minimal petroleum use, in a manner that doesn't exploit the farmers. Most of us won't have a diversified farm located within walking distance, or a Local Foods-R-Us opening nearby anytime soon. Here are some guidelines that can help define responsible food choices.

  Begin by visiting a nearby farmers' market to see what's available. Don't go in with the goal of buying anything in particular, but simply to learn. Is it local? Most farmers' markets have rules about how recently vegetables can have been picked. Are they from a small farm? Probably; if not, they likely wouldn't be sold there. Are they organic? Likely; while certification is not always required at these markets, most small market growers have assumed sustainability as part of their identity. It's probably the most common question they hear, so ask. Pay attention to what's available, what is in season. Every region has its strengths and weaknesses. Some are obvious (seafood near the coasts, or citrus in Florida). Others you'll need to learn. Buy a good supply of what you can use.

  Now, armed with what you learned at the farmers' market, you can visit your conventional grocery store. Applying ethics in a modern grocery store can be daunting, but here are a few general rules that may help sort out the whole equation.

  If items are available regionally, and are in season, get them from a farmer or ask a grocer to obtain them from a local source.

  Do as much as possible of your own cooking or preparation. Make meal plans for the seasons, rather than starting with a recipe and having a treasure hunt for its ingredients.

  Food processing uses energy in two main ways: (1) extracting, dicing, mixing, and cooking the ingredients; (2) transporting each individual ingredient. Products with fewer ingredients have probably burned less gas. For example, the oatmeal box on our pantry shelf lists one ingredient: rolled oats. With some local walnuts and honey, it makes a great breakfast. By contrast, our Free-range Happy 75% Organic Cereal Chunks box lists seventeen ingredients, all of which had to be transported to the processing plant. Who even knows how much fossil fuel it took to make it 75% Happy?

  For fresh fruits and vegetables, consider travel distance. On an autumn trip to our grocery I found apples grown in a neighboring state (North Carolina), Washington State, and New Zealand. That choice is easy. If we lived in Oregon, that would be a different easy choice.

  Consider how you feel about using energy to move water. All fresh p
roduce contains a lot of it. Apparent differences between more and less juicy items can be deceiving: watermelon is 92 percent water; cucumbers 96 percent; tomatoes 95 percent, while on the firmer side, carrots are 92 percent; peppers 94 percent; and broccoli 91 percent. All watery. If you care about this, when considering world travelers, favor dried fruits or vegetables, dried spices, nuts, coffee beans, dry beans, and grains.

  If produce or a processed item needs to be refrigerated (or frozen), energy was used to keep it cool from its point of origin to you. How can you tell? It's refrigerated (or frozen) in the store!

  Should you buy industrial organics? By shifting to organic methods, corporate farms are reducing the pesticide loads in our soil and water, in a big way. This should be one of many considerations, along with everything listed above.

  How local is local? Our friend Gary Nabhan, in his book Coming Home to Eat, defined it as a 250-mile-radius circle for the less-productive desert Southwest. By contrast, the Bay Area group Locavores (www.locavores.com) recommends a 100-mile-radius circle for the more fertile California valleys. It depends on the region, and the product. For us, in Appalachia, seasonal vegetables are literally next door, but our dairy products come from about 120 miles away. That's better, we think, than 1,200, which is also an option in our store. We bear in mind our different concerns: fuel use, pesticide use, quality, and support for farms. By pushing the market with our buying habits, we continually shape our buying choices, and the nature of farming.