Small Wonder

by Barbara Kingsolver

  Gas-guzzling area number two, and this may surprise you, is our diet. Americans have a taste for food that's been seeded, fertilized, harvested, processed, and packaged in grossly energy-expensive ways and then shipped, often refrigerated, for so many miles it might as well be green cheese from the moon. Even if you walk or bike to the store, if you come home with bananas from Ecuador, tomatoes from Holland, cheese from France, and artichokes from California, you have guzzled some serious gas. This extravagance that most of us take for granted is a stunning energy boondoggle: Transporting 5 calories' worth of strawberry from California to New York costs 435 calories of fossil fuel. The global grocery store may turn out to be the last great losing proposition of our species.

  Most Americans are entangled in a car dependency not of our own making, but nobody has to eat foods out of season from Rio de Janeiro. It's a decision we remake daily, and an unnecessary kind of consumption that I decided some time ago to try to expunge from my life. I had a head start because I grew up among farmers and have found since then that you can't take the country out of the girl. Wherever I've lived, I've gardened, even when the only dirt I owned was a planter box on an apartment balcony. I've grown food through good times and bad, busy and slow, richer and poorer--especially poorer. When people protest that gardening is an expensive hobby, I suggest they go through their garden catalogs and throw out the ones that offer footwear and sundials. Seeds cost pennies apiece or less. For years I've grown much of what my family eats and tried to attend to the sources of the rest. As I began to understand the energy crime of food transportation, I tried to attend even harder, eliminating any foods grown on the dark side of the moon. I began asking after the processes that brought each item to my door: what people had worked where, for slave wages and with deadly pesticides; what places had been deforested; what species were being driven extinct for my cup of coffee or banana bread. It doesn't taste so good when you think about what died going into it.

  Responsible eating is not so impossible as it seems. I was encouraged in my quest by This Organic Life, a compelling book by Joan Dye Gussow that tells how, and more important why, she aspired to and achieved vegetable self-sufficiency. She does it in her small backyard in upstate New York, challenging me to make better use of my luxuries of larger space and milder clime. Sure enough, she's right. In the year since I started counting, I've found I need never put a vegetable on my table that has traveled more than an hour or so from its home ground to ours.

  I should explain that I do this in the places where I live, because I am not I, but we. My husband and I met in our late thirties; he had already grown deep roots in a farming community in southern Appalachia. I had roots of my own, plus a kid, in my little rancho outside Tucson, Arizona. So our marriage is a more conspicuous compromise than most: We all live out the school year in the Southwest and spend the summer growing season in Appalachia. By turns we work two very different farms, both of which we share with other families who inhabit them year-round so nothing has to lie very fallow or stand empty. Eventually, when we've fulfilled all our premarital obligations, we'll settle in one place. Until then I blow some of the parsimony of my daily bedroom-slipper commute on one whopper of an annual round trip, but it's a fine life for a gardener. In the mild winters of Tucson, where we get regular freezes but no snow, we grow the cool-weather crops that can take a little frost: broccoli, peas, spinach, lettuce, Chinese vegetables, garlic, artichokes. And in the verdant southern summers, we raise everything else: corn, peppers, green beans, tomatoes, eggplants, too much zucchini, and never enough of the staples (potatoes, dried beans) that carry us through the year. Most of whatever else I need comes from the local growers I meet at farmers' markets. Our family has arrived, as any sentient people would, at a strong preference for the breads and pasta we make ourselves, so I'm always searching out proximate sources of organic flour. Just by reading labels, I have discovered I can buy milk that comes from organic dairies only a few counties away; in season I can often get it from my neighbors, in exchange for vegetables; and I've become captivated by the alchemy of creating my own cheese and butter. (Butter is a sport; cheese is an art.) Wine-making remains well beyond my powers, but fortunately good wine is made in both Arizona and Virginia, and in the latter state I am especially glad to support some neighbors in a crashing tobacco-based economy who are trying to hold on to their farms by converting them to vineyards. Somewhere near you, I'm sure, is a farmer who desperately needs your support, for one of a thousand reasons that are pulling the wool out of the proud but unraveling traditions of family farming.

  I am trying to learn about this complicated web as I go, and I'm in no position to judge anyone else's personal habits, believe me. My life is riddled with energy inconsistencies: We try hard to conserve, but I've found no way as yet to rear and support my family without a car, a computer, the occasional airplane flight, a teenager's bathroom equipped with a hair dryer, et cetera. I'm no Henry D. Thoreau. (And just for the record, for all his glorification of his bean patch, Henry is known habitually to have gone next door to eat Mrs. Ralph W. Emerson's cooking.) Occasional infusions of root beer are apparently necessary to my family's continued life, along with a brand of vegetable chips made in Uniondale, New York. And there's no use in my trying to fib about it, either, for it's always when I have just these items in the grocery cart, and my hair up in the wackiest of slapdash ponytails, that some kind person in the checkout line will declare, "Oh, Ms. Kingsolver, I just love your work!"

  Our quest is only to be thoughtful and simplify our needs, step by step. In the way of imported goods, I try to stick to nonperishables that are less fuel-costly to ship; rice, flour, and coffee are good examples. Just as simply as I could buy coffee and spices from the grocery, I can order them through a collective in Fort Wayne, Indiana, that gives my money directly to cooperative farmers in Africa and Central America who are growing these crops without damaging their tropical habitat. We struggled with the notion of giving up coffee altogether until we learned from ornithologist friends who study migratory birds being lost to habitat destruction, that there is a coffee-cultivation practice that helps rather than hurts. Any coffee labeled "shade grown"--now available in most North American markets--was grown under rain-forest canopy on a farm that is holding a piece of jungle intact, providing subsistence for its human inhabitants and its birds.

  I understand the power implicit in these choices. That I have such choices at all is a phenomenal privilege in a world where so many go hungry, even as our nation uses food as a political weapon, embargoing grain shipments to places such as Nicaragua and Iraq. I find both security and humility in feeding myself as best I can, and learning to live within the constraints of my climate and seasons. I like the challenge of organizing our meals as my grandmothers did, starting with the question of season and which cup is at the moment running over. I love to trade recipes with my gardening friends, and join in their cheerful competition to see who can come up with the most ways to conceal the i.d. of a zucchini squash.

  If we are blessed with an abundance of choices about food, we are surely also obliged to consider the responsibility implicit in our choices. There has never been a more important time to think about where our food comes from. We could make for ourselves a safer nation, overnight, simply by giving more support to our local food economies and learning ways of eating and living around a table that reflects the calendar. Our families, of course, will never need to be as beholden to the seasons as the Native Americans who called February by the name "Hungry Month," and I'm grateful for that. But we can try to live close enough to the land's ordinary time that we notice when something is out of place and special. My grandfather Kingsolver used to tell me with a light in his eyes about the boxcar that came through Kentucky on the L&N line when he was a boy--only once a year, at Christmas--carrying oysters and oranges from the coast. Throughout my own childhood, every year at Christmastime while an endless burden of wants burgeoned around everybody else, my grandfather
wanted only two things: a bowl of oyster soup and an orange. The depth of his pleasure in that meal was so tangible, even to a child, that my memory of it fills me with wonder at how deeply fulfillment can blossom from a cultivated ground of restraint.

  I remember this as I struggle--along with most parents I know--to make clear distinctions between love and indulgence in raising my children. I honestly believe that material glut can rob a child of certain kinds of satisfaction--though deprivation is no picnic, either. And so our family indulges in exotic treats on big occasions. A box of Portuguese clementines one Christmas is still on Lily's catalog of favorite memories, and a wild turkey we got from Canada one Thanksgiving remains on my own. We enjoy these kinds of things spectacularly because at our house they're rare.

  And yes, we eat some animals, in careful deference to the reasons for avoiding doing so. I don't really feel, as some have told me, that it's a sin to eat anything with a face, nor do I believe it's possible to live by that rule unless one maintains a certain degree of purposeful ignorance. Butterflies and bees and locusts all have faces, and they die like lambs to the slaughter (and in greater numbers) whenever a field of vegetable food is sprayed or harvested. Faceless? Not the birds that eat the poisoned insects, the bunnies sliced beneath the plow, the foxes displaced from the forest-turned-to-organic-wheat-field, and so on. If the argument is that meat comes from higher orders of life than those creatures, I wonder how the artificial, glassy-eyed construct of a bovine life gets to weigh more than the wiles of a fox or the virtuosity of a songbird. Myself, I love wild lives at least as much as tame ones, and eating costs lives. Even organic farmers kill crop predators in ways that aren't pretty, so a vegetable diet doesn't provide quite the sparkling karma one might wish. Most soybeans grown in this country are genetically engineered in ways that are anathema to biodiversity. So drinking soy milk, however wholesome it may be, doesn't save animals.

  No, it's the other savings that compel me most toward a vegetable-based diet--the ones revealed by simple math. A pound of cow or hog flesh costs about ten pounds of plant matter to produce. So a field of grain that would feed a hundred people, when fed instead to cows or pigs that are then fed to people, fills the bellies of only ten of them; the other ninety, I guess, will just have to go hungry. That, in a nutshell, is how it's presently shaking down with the world, the world's arable land, and the world's hamburger eaters.

  Some years ago our family took a trip across the Midwest to visit relatives in Iowa, and for thousands of miles along the way we saw virtually no animal life except feedlots full of cattle--surely the most unappetizing sight and smell I've encountered in my life (and my life includes some years of intimacy with diaper pails). And we saw almost no plant life but the endless fields of corn and soybeans required to feed those pathetic penned beasts. Our kids kept asking, mile after mile, "What used to be here?" It led to long discussions of America's vanished prairie, Mexico's vanished forests, and the diversity of species in the South American rain forests that are now being extinguished to make way for more cattle graze. We also talked about a vanishing American culture: During the last half century or so, each passing year has seen about half a million more people move away from farms (including all of my children's grandparents or great-grandparents). The lively web of farmhouses, schoolhouses, pasture lands, woodlots, livestock barns, poultry coops, and tilled fields that once constituted America's breadbasket has been replaced with a meat-fattening monoculture. When we got home our daughter announced firmly, "I'm never going to eat a cow again."

  When your ten-year-old calls your conscience to order, you show up: She hasn't eaten a cow since, and neither have we. It's an industry I no longer want to get tangled up in, even at the level of the ninety-nine-cent exchange. Each and every quarter pound of hamburger is handed across the counter after the following productions costs, which I've searched out precisely: 100 gallons of water, 1.2 pounds of grain, a cup of gasoline, greenhouse-gas emissions equivalent to those produced by a six-mile drive in your average car, and the loss of 1.25 pounds of topsoil, every inch of which took five hundred years for the microbes and earthworms to build. How can all this cost less than a dollar, and who is supposed to pay for the rest of it? If I were a cow, right here is where I'd go mad.

  Thus our family parted ways with all animal flesh wrought from feedlots. But for some farmers on certain land, assuming that they don't have the option of turning their acreage into a national park (and that people will keep wanting to eat), the most ecologically sound use of it is to let free-range animals turn its grass and weeds into edible flesh, rather than turning it every year under the plow. We also have neighbors who raise organic beef for their family on hardly more than the byproducts of other things they grow. It's quite possible to raise animals sustainably, and we support the grass-based farmers around us by purchasing their chickens and eggs.

  Or we did, that is, until Lily got her chickens. The next time a roasted bird showed up on our table she grew wide-eyed, set down her fork, and asked, "Mama...is that...Mr. Doodle?"

  I reassured her a dozen times that I would never cook Mr. Doodle; this was just some chicken we didn't know. But a lesson had come home to, well, roost. All of us sooner or later must learn to look our food in the face. If we're willing to eat an animal, it's probably only responsible to accept the truth of its living provenance rather than pretending it's a "product" from a frozen-foods shelf with its gizzard in a paper envelope. I've been straight with my kids ever since the first one leveled me with her eye and said, "Mom, no offense, but I think you're the Tooth Fairy." So at dinner that night we talked about the biology, ethics, and occasional heartbreaks of eating food. I told Lily that when I was a girl growing up among creatures I would someday have to eat, my mother had promised we would never butcher anything that had a first name. Thereafter I was always told from the outset which animals I could name. I offered Lily the same deal.

  So she made her peace with the consumption of her beloveds' nameless relatives. We still weren't sure, though, how we'd fare when it came to eating their direct descendants. We'd allowed that next spring she might let a hen incubate and hatch out a few new chicks (Lily quickly decided on the precise number she wanted and, significantly, their names), but we stressed that we weren't in this business to raise ten thousand pets. Understood, said Lily. So we waited a week, then two, while Jess, Bess, and company worked through their putative emotional trauma and settled in to laying. We wondered, How will it go? When our darling five-year-old pantheist, who believes that even stuffed animals have souls, goes out there with the egg basket one day and comes back with eggs, how will we explain to her that she can't name those babes, because we're going to scramble them?

  Here is how it went: She returned triumphantly that morning with one unbelievably small brown egg in her basket, planted her feet on the kitchen tile, and shouted at the top of her lungs, "Attention, everybody, I have an announcement: FREE BREAKFAST."

  We agreed that the first one was hers. I cooked it to her very exact specifications, and she ate it with gusto. We admired the deep red-orange color of the yolk, from the beta-carotenes in those tasty green weeds. Lily could hardly wait for the day when all of us would sit down to a free breakfast, courtesy of her friends. I wish that every child could feel so proud, and every family could share the grace of our table.

  I think a lot about those thirty citizens of India who, it's said, could live on the average American's stuff. I wonder if I could build a life of contentment on their material lot, and then I look around my house and wonder what they'd make of mine. My closet would clothe more than half of them, and my books--good Lord--could open a library branch in New Delhi. Our family's musical instruments would outfit an entire (if very weird) village band, featuring electric guitars, violin, eclectic percussion section, and a really dusty clarinet. We have more stuff than we need; there is no question of our being perfect. I'm not even sure what "perfect" means in this discussion. I'm not trying to persuade my famil
y to evaporate and live on air. We're here, we're alive, it's the only one we get, as far as I know, so I am keenly inclined to take hold of life by its huevos. As a dinner guest I gratefully eat just about anything that's set before me, because graciousness among friends is dearer to me than any other agenda. I'm not up for a guilt trip, just an adventure in bearable lightness. I approach our efforts at simplicity as a novice approaches her order, aspiring to a lifetime of deepening understanding, discipline, serenity, and joy. Likening voluntary simplicity to a religion is neither hyperbole nor sacrilege. Some people look around and declare the root of all evil to be sex or blasphemy, and so they aspire to be pious and chaste. Where I look for evil I'm more likely to see degradations of human and natural life, an immoral gap between rich and poor, a ravaged earth. At the root of these I see greed and overconsumption by the powerful minority. I was born to that caste, but I can aspire to waste not and want less.

  I'm skeptical of evangelism, so I'm not going to have a tent revival here. But if you've come with me this far, you are in some sense a fellow traveler, and I'm glad for your company. In this congregation we don't confess or sit around chanting "we are not worthy"; we just do what we can and trust that the effort matters. Of all the ways we consume, food is a sensible one to attend to. Eating is a genuine need, continuous from our first day to our last, amounting over time to our most significant statement of what we are made of and what we have chosen to make of our connection to home ground. We can hardly choose not to eat, but we have to choose how, and our choices can have astounding consequences. Consider this: The average food item set before a U.S. consumer traveled 1,300 miles to get there. If Mr. Average eats ten or so items a day (and most of us eat more), in a year's time his food will have conquered five million miles by land, sea, and air. Picture a truck loaded with apples and oranges and iceberg lettuce rumbling to the moon and back ten times a year, all just for you. Multiply that by the number of Americans who like to eat--picture that flotilla of 285 million trucks on their way to the moon--and tell me you don't think it's time to revise this scenario.