Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

by Barbara Kingsolver

  Here are some recipes that bring out the best in dark, leafy greens. These are staple meals for our family in the season when greens are coming up in our garden by the bushel.

  EGGS IN A NEST

  (This recipe makes dinner for a family of four, but can easily be cut in half.)

  2 cups uncooked brown rice

  Cook rice with 4 cups water in a covered pot while other ingredients are being prepared.

  Olive oil—a few tablespoons

  1 medium onion, chopped, and garlic to taste

  Sauté onions and garlic in olive oil in a wide skillet until lightly golden.

  Carrots, chopped

  ½ cup dried tomatoes

  Add and sauté for a few more minutes, adding just enough water to rehydrate the tomatoes.

  1 really large bunch of chard, coarsely chopped

  Mix with other vegetables and cover pan for a few minutes. Uncover, stir well, then use the back of a spoon to make depressions in the cooked leaves, circling the pan like numbers on a clock.

  8 eggs

  Break an egg into each depression, being careful to keep yolks whole. Cover pan again and allow eggs to poach for 3 to 5 minutes. Remove from heat and serve over rice.

  SPINACH LASAGNA

  1 pound whole-grain lasagna noodles Prepare according to package directions.

  4 cups chopped spinach Steam for 2–3 minutes, let excess water drain.

  16 ounces tomato sauce

  2 cups fresh ricotta

  2 cups mozzarella

  Spread a thin layer of tomato sauce on the bottom of a large casserole. Cover surface with a layer of noodles, ½ of the ricotta, ½ of the spinach, ? of the remaining sauce, and ? of the mozzarella. Lay down another layer of noodles, the rest of the ricotta, the rest of the spinach, ? of the sauce, and ? of the mozzarella. Spread a final layer of noodles, the remainder of the sauce and mozzarella; bake uncovered at 350° for 40 minutes.

  Download these and all Animal, Vegetable, Miracle recipes at www.AnimalVegetableMiracle.com

  GREENS SEASON MEAL PLAN

  Sunday ~ Greek roasted chicken and potatoes, chard-leaf dolmades with béchamel sauce

  Monday ~ Eggs in a Nest

  Tuesday ~ Chicken salad (from Sunday’s leftover chicken) on a bed of baby greens

  Wednesday ~ Pasta tossed with salmon, sautéed fresh chard, and dried tomatoes

  Thursday ~ Dinner salad with boiled eggs, broccoli, nuts, and feta; fresh bread

  Friday ~ Pizza with chopped sautéed spinach, mushrooms, and cheese

  Saturday ~ Spinach lasagna

  * * *

  4 • STALKING THE VEGETANNUAL

  If potatoes can surprise some part of their audience by growing leaves, it may not have occurred to everyone that lettuce has a flower part. It does, they all do. Virtually all nonanimal foods we eat come from flowering plants. Exceptions are mushrooms, seaweeds, and pine nuts. If other exotic edibles exist that you call food, I salute you.

  Flowering plants, known botanically as angiosperms, evolved from ancestors similar to our modern-day conifers. The flower is a handy reproductive organ that came into its own during the Cretaceous era, right around the time when dinosaurs were for whatever reason getting downsized. In the millions of years since then, flowering plants have established themselves as the most conspicuously successful terrestrial life forms ever, having moved into every kind of habitat, in infinite variations. Flowering plants are key players in all the world’s ecotypes: the deciduous forests, the rain forests, the grasslands. They are the desert cacti and the tundra scrub. They’re small and they’re large, they fill swamps and tolerate drought, they have settled into most every niche in every kind of place. It only stands to reason that we would eat them.

  Flowering plants come in packages as different as an oak tree and a violet, but they all have a basic life history in common. They sprout and leaf out; they bloom and have sex by somehow rubbing one flower’s boy stuff against another’s girl parts. Since they can’t engage in hot pursuit, they lure a third party, such as bees, into the sexual act—or else (depending on species) wait for the wind. From that union comes the blessed event, babies made, in the form of seeds cradled inside some form of fruit. Finally, sooner or later—because after that, what’s the point anymore?—they die. Among the plants known as annuals, this life history is accomplished all in a single growing season, commonly starting with spring and ending with frost. The plant waits out the winter in the form of a seed, safely protected from weather, biding its time until conditions are right for starting over again. The vegetables we eat may be leaves, buds, fruits, or seeds, but each comes to us from some point along this same continuum, the code all annual plants must live by. No variations are allowed. They can’t set fruit, for example, before they bloom. As obvious as this may seem, it’s easy enough to forget in a supermarket culture where the plant stages constantly present themselves in random order.

  To recover an intuitive sense of what will be in season throughout the year, picture a season of foods unfolding as if from one single plant. Take a minute to study this creation—an imaginary plant that bears over the course of one growing season a cornucopia of all the different vegetable products we can harvest. We’ll call it a vegetannual. Picture its life passing before your eyes like a time-lapse film: first, in the cool early spring, shoots poke up out of the ground. Small leaves appear, then bigger leaves. As the plant grows up into the sunshine and the days grow longer, flower buds will appear, followed by small green fruits. Under midsummer’s warm sun, the fruits grow larger, riper, and more colorful. As days shorten into the autumn, these mature into hard-shelled fruits with appreciable seeds inside. Finally, as the days grow cool, the vegetannual may hoard the sugars its leaves have made, pulling them down into a storage unit of some kind: a tuber, bulb, or root.

  So goes the year. First the leaves: spinach, kale, lettuce, and chard (here, that’s April and May). Then more mature heads of leaves and flower heads: cabbage, romaine, broccoli, and cauliflower (May–June). Then tender young fruit-set: snow peas, baby squash, cucumbers (June), followed by green beans, green peppers, and small tomatoes (July). Then more mature, colorfully ripened fruits: beefsteak tomatoes, eggplants, red and yellow peppers (late July–August). Then the large, hard-shelled fruits with developed seeds inside: cantaloupes, honeydews, watermelons, pumpkins, winter squash (August–September). Last come the root crops, and so ends the produce parade.

  Plainly these don’t all come from the same plant, but each comes from a plant, that’s the point—a plant predestined to begin its life in the spring and die in the fall. (A few, like onions and carrots, are attempting to be biennials, but we’ll ignore that for now.) Each plant part we eat must come in its turn—leaves, buds, flowers, green fruits, ripe fruits, hard fruits—because that is the necessary order of things for an annual plant. For the life of them, they can’t do it differently.

  Some minor deviations and a bit of overlap are allowed, but in general, picturing an imaginary vegetannual plant is a pretty reliable guide to what will be in season, wherever you live. If you find yourself eating a watermelon in April, you can count back three months and imagine a place warm enough in January for this plant to have launched its destiny. Mexico maybe, or southern California. Chile is also a possibility. If you’re inclined to think this way, consider what it took to transport a finicky fruit the size of a human toddler to your door, from that locale.

  Our gardening forebears meant watermelon to be the juicy, barefoot taste of a hot summer’s end, just as a pumpkin is the trademark fruit of late October. Most of us accept the latter, and limit our jack-o’-lantern activities to the proper botanical season. Waiting for a watermelon is harder. It’s tempting to reach for melons, red peppers, tomatoes, and other late-summer delights before the summer even arrives. But it’s actually possible to wait, celebrating each season when it comes, not fretting about its being absent at all other times because something else good is at hand.

&n
bsp; If many of us would view this style of eating as deprivation, that’s only because we’ve grown accustomed to the botanically outrageous condition of having everything, always. This may be the closest thing we have right now to a distinctive national cuisine. Well-heeled North American epicures are likely to gather around a table where whole continents collide discreetly on a white tablecloth: New Zealand lamb with Italian porcinis, Peruvian asparagus, and a hearty French Bordeaux. The date on the calendar is utterly irrelevant.

  I’ve enjoyed my share of such meals, but I’m beginning at least to notice when I’m consuming the United Nations of edible plants and animals all in one seating. (Or the WTO, is more like it.) On a winter’s day not long ago I was served a sumptuous meal like this, finished off with a dessert of raspberries. Because they only grow in temperate zones, not the tropics, these would have come from somewhere deep in the Southern Hemisphere. I was amazed that such small, eminently bruisable fruits could survive a zillion-mile trip looking so good (I myself look pretty wrecked after a mere red-eye from California), and I mumbled some reserved awe over that fact. I think my hostess was amused by my country-mouse naïveté. “This is New York,” she assured me. “We can get anything we want, any day of the year.”

  So it is. And I don’t wish to be ungracious, but we get it at a price. Most of that is not measured in money, but in untallied debts that will be paid by our children in the currency of extinctions, economic unravelings, and global climate change. I do know it’s impolite to raise such objections at the dinner table. Seven raspberries are not (I’ll try to explain someday to my grandkids) the end of the world. I ate them and said “Thank you.”

  The Global Equation

  * * *

  By purchasing local vegetables instead of South American ones, for example, aren’t we hurting farmers in developing countries? If you’re picturing Farmer Juan and his family gratefully wiping sweat from their brows when you buy that Ecuadoran banana, picture this instead: the CEO of Dole Inc. in his air-conditioned office in Westlake Village, California. He’s worth $1.4 billion; Juan gets about $6 a day. Much money is made in the global reshuffling of food, but the main beneficiaries are processors, brokers, shippers, supermarkets, and oil companies.

  Developed nations promote domestic overproduction of commodity crops that are sold on the international market at well below market price, undermining the fragile economies of developing countries. Often this has the effect of driving small farmers into urban areas for jobs, decreasing the agricultural output of a country, and forcing the population to purchase those same commodities from abroad. Those who do stay in farm work are likely to end up not as farm owners, but as labor on plantations owned by multinationals. They may find themselves working in direct conflict with local subsistence. Thus, when Americans buy soy products from Brazil, for example, we’re likely supporting an inter national company that has burned countless acres of Amazon rain forest to grow soy for export, destroying indigenous populations. Global trade deals negotiated by the World Trade Organization and World Bank allow corporations to shop for food from countries with the poorest environmental, safety, and labor conditions. While passing bargains on to consumers, this pits farmers in one country against those in another, in a downward wage spiral. Product quality is somewhat irrelevant.

  Most people no longer believe that buying sneakers made in Asian sweat-shops is a kindness to those child laborers. Farming is similar. In every country on earth, the most humane scenario for farmers is likely to be feeding those who live nearby—if international markets would allow them to do it. Food transport has become a bizarre and profitable economic equation that’s no longer really about feeding anyone: in our own nation we export 1.1 million tons of potatoes, while we also import 1.4 million tons. If you care about farmers, let the potatoes stay home. For more information visit: www.viacampesina.org.

  * * *

  STEVEN L. HOPP

  Human manners are wildly inconsistent; plenty of people before me have said so. But this one takes the cake: the manner in which we’re allowed to steal from future generations, while commanding them not to do that to us, and rolling our eyes at anyone who is tediously PC enough to point this out. The conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners.

  Our culture is not unacquainted with the idea of food as a spiritually loaded commodity. We’re just particular about which spiritual arguments we’ll accept as valid for declining certain foods. Generally unacceptable reasons: environmental destruction, energy waste, the poisoning of workers. Acceptable: it’s prohibited by a holy text. Set down a platter of country ham in front of a rabbi, an imam, and a Buddhist monk, and you may have just conjured three different visions of damnation. Guests with high blood pressure may add a fourth. Is it such a stretch, then, to make moral choices about food based on the global consequences of its production and transport? In a country where 5 percent of the world’s population glugs down a quarter of all the fuel, also belching out that much of the world’s waste and pollution, we’ve apparently made big choices about consumption. They could be up for review.

  The business of importing foods across great distances is not, by its nature, a boon to Third World farmers, but it’s very good business for oil companies. Transporting a single calorie of a perishable fresh fruit from California to New York takes about 87 calories worth of fuel. That’s as efficient as driving from Philadelphia to Annapolis, and back, in order to walk three miles on a treadmill in a Maryland gym. There may be people who’d do it. Pardon me while I ask someone else to draft my energy budget.

  In many social circles it’s ordinary for hosts to accommodate vegetarian guests, even if they’re carnivores themselves. Maybe the world would likewise become more hospitable to diners who are queasy about fuel-guzzling foods, if that preference had a name. Petrolophobes? Seasonal-tarians? Local eaters, Homeys? Lately I’ve begun seeing the term locavores, and I like it: both scientifically and socially descriptive, with just the right hint of “Livin’ la vida loca.”

  Slow Food International has done a good job of putting a smile on this eating style, rather than a pious frown, even while sticking to the quixotic agenda of fighting overcentralized agribusiness. The engaging strategy of the Slowies (their logo is a snail) is to celebrate what we have, standing up for the pleasures that seasonal eating can bring. They have their work cut out for them, as the American brain trust seems mostly blank on that subject. Consider the frustration of the man who wrote in this complaint to a food columnist: having studied the new food pyramid brought to us by the U.S. Dietary Guidelines folks (impossible to decipher but bless them, they do keep trying), he had his marching orders for “2 cups of fruit, 2½ cups of vegetables a day.” So he marched down to his grocery and bought (honest to Pete) eighty-three plums, pears, peaches, and apples. Outraged, he reported that virtually the entire lot was “rotten, mealy, tasteless, juiceless, or hard as a rock and refusing to ripen.”

  Given the date of the column, this had occurred in February or March. The gentleman lived in Frostburg, Maryland, where they would still have been deeply involved in a thing called winter. I’m sure he didn’t really think tasty tree-ripened plums, peaches, and apples were hanging outside ripe for the picking in the orchards around…um, Frost-burg. Probably he didn’t think “orchard” at all—how many of us do, in the same sentence with “fruit”? Our dietary guidelines come to us without a roadmap.

  Concentrating on local foods means thinking of fruit invariably as the product of an orchard, and a winter squash as the fruit of an early-winter farm. It’s a strategy that will keep grocery money in the neighborhood, where it gets recycled into your own school system and local businesses. The green spaces surrounding your town stay green, and farmers who live nearby get to grow more food next year, for you. But before any of that, it’s a win-win strategy for anyone with taste buds. It begins with rethinking a position that is only superficially about deprivation. Citize
ns of frosty worlds unite, and think about marching past the off-season fruits: you have nothing to lose but mealy, juiceless, rock-hard and refusing to ripen.

  5 •MOLLY MOOCHING

  April

  In the year 1901, Sanford Webb ran a dozen head of cattle on his new farm and watched to see where they settled down every night. The place they chose, he reasoned, would be the most sheltered spot in the hollow. That was where he built his house, with clapboard sides, a steep tin roof, and a broad front porch made of river rock. The milled door frames and stair rails he ordered from Sears, Roebuck. He built the house for his new bride, Lizzie, and the children they would raise here—eleven in all—during the half-century to come.

  In the 1980s those children put the home place up for sale. They weren’t keen to do it, but had established farmsteads of their own by the time their parents passed away. All were elderly now, and none was in a position to move back to the family farm and fix up the home place. They decided to let it go out of the family.

  Steven walked into this picture, and a deal with fate was sealed. He didn’t know that. He was looking for a bargain fixer-upper he could afford on his modest academic salary, a quiet place to live where he could listen to the birds and maybe grow some watermelons. He was a bachelor, hardly looking for a new family at that moment, but the surviving Webbs—including the youngest sisters, who lived adjacent, now in their seventies—observed that he needed some looking after. Dinner invitations ensued. When Steven eventually brought a wife and kids to the farm, we were gathered into that circle. The Webbs unfailingly invite us to their family reunions. Along with the pleasures of friendship and help with anything from binding a quilt to canning, we’ve been granted a full century’s worth of stories attached to this farm.