Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

“Most people of my grandparents’ generation had an intuitive sense of agricultural basics: when various fruits and vegetables come into season, which ones keep through the winter, how to preserve others. On what day autumn’s first frost will likely fall on their county, and when to expect the last one in spring. Which crops can be planted before the late frost, and which must wait. Which grains are autumn-planted. What an asparagus patch looks like in August. Most importantly: what animals and vegetables thrive in one’s immediate region, and how to live well on those, with little else thrown into the mix beyond a bag of flour, a pinch of salt, and a handful of coffee. Few people of my generation, and approximately none of our children, could answer any of those questions, let alone all. This knowledge has vanished from our culture.” 

Ignorance of even basic farming is one of the central cultural problems that Kingsolver is seeking to counteract with her book. She spends time exploring exactly how this knowledge disappeared after only a few generations, but though the lost is understandable, it is still tragic. Kingsolver rightly points out that lack of connection to farming the land makes it incredibly difficult for the average American to know much about what they are eating. One of her central arguments is that reconnecting with gardening and farming is the best way to regain an intuitive knowledge of food production.

“We also have largely convinced ourselves it wasn’t too important. Consider how many Americans might respond to a proposal that agriculture was to become a mandatory subject in all schools, alongside reading and mathematics. A fair number of parents would get hot under the collar to see their kids’ attention being pulled away from the essentials of grammar, the all-important trigonometry, to make room for down-on-the-farm stuff. The baby boom psyche embraces a powerful presumption that education is a key to moving away from manual labor and dirt—two undeniable ingredients of farming. It's good enough for us that somebody, somewhere, knows food production well enough to serve the rest of us with all we need to eat, each day of our lives.” 

One of the most troubling issues Kingsolver points out is American complacence with the current food culture—or lack thereof. Farming and knowing the origins of food is currently unimportant knowledge; as Kingsolver points out, parents would be outraged if schools taught this. Instead, Americans are happy for the tasks related to food production to crop up somewhere else. Throughout the book, Kingsolver explores how this current mindset is the result of other cultural factors as well as marketing by food conglomerates. 

“Many bright people are really in the dark about vegetable life. Biology teachers face kids in classrooms who may not even believe in the metamorphosis of bud to flower to fruit and seed, but rather, some continuum of pansies becoming petunias becoming chrysanthemums; that's the only reality they witness as landscapers come to campuses and city parks and surreptitiously yank out one flower before it fades from its prime, replacing it with another. The same disconnection from natural processes may be at the heart of our country’s shift away from believing in evolution. In the past, principles of natural selection and change over time made sense to kids who’d watched it all unfold. Whether or not they knew the terms, farm families understood the processes well enough to imitate them: culling, selecting, and improving their herds and crops. For modern kids who intuitively believe in the spontaneous generation of fruits and vegetables in the produce section, trying to get their minds around the slow speciation of the plant kingdom may be a stretch.” 

Kingsolver holds a master’s degree in evolutionary biology and so touches on the ideas of evolution several times throughout the book. In this passage, she connects the American ignorance of even simple plant life cycles to the continuing movement against the theory of evolution. She argues that the complex process of evolution must seem unbelievable if young people do not even understand where their fruits and vegetables come from. From there, it is a short step to understand how people would think the common American food culture is healthy or at least not harmful.

“Food culture in the United States has long been cast as the property of a privileged class. It is nothing of the kind. Culture is the property of a species.” 

Here, Kingsolver succinctly summarizes another major American problem and contributing factor to the wasteful, unhealthy food production system in the U.S. Culturally, there is the misguided belief that good food—wholesome food—is only available to the wealthy. That to eat nourishing, sustainably grown produce is a privilege. However, the truth is that there is more than enough to go around.

“We’re a nation with an eating disorder, and we know it. The multiple maladies caused by bad eating are taking a dire toll on our health—most tragically for our kids, who are predicted to be this country’s first generation to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents. That alone is a stunning enough fact to give us pause. So is a government policy that advises us to eat more fruits and vegetables, while doling out subsidies not to fruit and vegetable farmers, but to commodity crops destined to become soda pop and cheap burgers. The Farm Bill, as of this writing, could aptly be called the Farm Kill, both for its effects on small farmers and for what it does to us, the consumers who are financing it.” 

Kingsolver devotes much time to exploring how the American food culture is not just harmful to the environment, it is harmful to the health of the nation as well. Here, she points out the effects of several generations of industrial farming—obesity and shorter lifespans. Both consumers and small farmers lost according to this system. The only winners are the industrial farms and the conglomerates that control them.

“The main barrier standing between ourselves and a local-food culture is not price, but attitude. The most difficult requirements are patience and a bit of restraint—virtues that are hardly the property of the wealthy. These virtues seem to find precious little shelter, in fact, in any modern quarter of this nation founded by Puritans. Furthermore, we apply them selectively: browbeating our teenagers with the message that they should wait for sex, for example. Only if they wait to experience intercourse under the ideal circumstances (the story goes), will they know its true value. ‘Blah blah blah,’ hears the teenager: words issuing from a mouth that can't even wait for the right time to eat a tomato, but instead consumes tasteless ones all winter to satisfy a craving for everything NOW.” 

Kingsolver continues to point out how unhealthy American food culture is the natural result of other unhealthy American cultural habits, especially the culture of convenience. She points out how the nation’s contradictory stance on food is at odds with its Puritan views on things like sex. She points out the illogic of parents encouraging restraint in one area of life while teaching their children that they can have whatever they want in other areas—such as food.

“Most of us are creatures so comforted by habit, it can take something on the order of religion to invoke new, more conscious behaviors—however glad we may be afterward that we went to the trouble.” 

Kingsolver advocates patience and care in eating as well as everything else, but does acknowledge that old habits die hard. She understands how difficult it can be to start a new mode of thinking and eating, especially when the culture’s structure discourages it. However, she remains adamant about the benefits of changing our food habits and is positive that a shift in mindset has more benefits than not.

“Modern US consumers now get to taste less than 1 percent of the vegetable varieties that were grown here a century ago. Those old-timers now lurk only in backyard gardens and on farms that specialize in direct sales—if they survive at all. Many heirlooms have been lost entirely.” 

Kingsolver explains the issue of industrial farming, one side effect of which is that America’s diet now mostly consists of cash crops: corn and soy, which appear in various forms in nearly every single processed food. She intentionally shocks the reader by revealing that 99% of the plant varieties our ancestors farmed are virtually obliterated now by cash crops and the profits they make for the conglomerates.

“Mom is losing, no doubt, because our vegetables have come to lack two features of interest: nutrition and flavor. Storage and transport take predictable tolls on the volatile plant compounds that subtly add up to taste and food value. Breeding to increase shelf life also has tended to decrease palatability. Bizarre as it seems, we’ve accepted a tradeoff that amounts to: ‘Give me every vegetable in every season, even if it tastes like a cardboard picture of its former self.’” 

As Kingsolver explores the major theme of the farming industry, she points out that the “progress” made in the development of hardier vegetables has had the additional side effect of making vegetables less delicious. This is in keeping with her continuing focus on the idea that there is more enjoyment in food grown conscientiously and close to home. She leaves the reader facing no downsides except the minor inconvenience of waiting for things to be in season.

“You can’t save the whales by eating whales, but paradoxically, you can help save rare, domesticated foods by eating them. They’re kept alive by gardeners who have a taste for them, and farmers who know they’ll be able to sell them. The consumer becomes a link in this conservation chain by seeking out the places where heirloom vegetables are sold, taking them home, whacking them up with knives, and learning to incorporate their exceptional tastes into personal and family expectations.” 

In perhaps Kingsolver’s most persuasive argument, she points out that all consumers must do to change food culture in America is to eat the delicious, eco-friendly produce grown by local farmers. Nothing could be easier or more enjoyable, she seems to say. Just eat—something you would do anyway. Because food culture grows out of a society’s eating habits.

“Most people no longer believe that buying sneakers made in Asian sweatshops is a kindness to those child laborers. Farming is similar. In every country on earth, the most human 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.” 

In this section, Steven L. Hopp shores up Kingsolver’s argument that the current American food system is less profitable than local farming, on top of everything else. He also offers hard numbers to show how the only thing that disappear, potentially, in everyone eating local is the fuel cost of transporting potatoes into and out of the country, for example. 

“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?” 

Kingsolver again points out the contradictions in American food culture, which accepts food decisions made for religious reasons, but not reasons of health or the betterment of the planet. While the US accepts that food is spiritual, there is still a disconnect between eating and the spiritual wellbeing of generations to come.

“Human manners are wildly inconsistent; plenty of people 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 that out. The conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners.” 

Kingsolver’s hardest-hitting argument is that the culture of wasteful farming and eating is having a serious negative effect on future generations. These generations will not only lack an understanding of food production but will have to deal with the fallout of pollutants on the environment and their own health.

“Over the last decade our country has lost an average of 300 farms a week. Large or small, each of those was the life’s work of a real person or family, people who built their lives around a promise and watched it break.” 

Kingsolver makes the issue of industrial farming personal, as she tells the stories of several small farms. Arguing for supporting these farms with buying choices, she does not shy away from facts. Pointing out just how many farmers must now sell to the big conglomerates puts in perspective just how stacked against them the system really is. 

“It’s interesting that penny-pinching is an accepted defense for toxic food habits, when frugality so rarely rules other consumer domains. The majority of Americans buy bottled drinking water, for example, even though water runs from the faucets at home for a fraction of the cost, and government quality standards are stricter for tap water than for bottled. At any income level, we can be relied upon for categorically unnecessary purchases: portable-earplug music instead of the radio; extra-fast Internet for leisure use; heavy vehicles to transport light loads; name-brand clothing instead of plainer gear. ‘Economizing,’ as applied to clothing, generally means looking for discount name brands instead of wearing last year’s clothes again. The dread of rearing unfashionable children is understandable. But as a priority, ‘makes me look cool’ has passed up ‘keeps arteries functional’ and left the kids huffing and puffing (fashionably) in the dust.” 

Another argument against local eating that Kingsolver explores and then essentially debunks is the idea that it is cheaper to buy processed foods. While Kingsolver acknowledges that the mass-produced, industrial foods are a few cents cheaper, she argues passionately that they cost much more in health conditions. She argues for a shift in mindset again, this time to view food as a justified “luxury” expense, due to its many benefits.

“When we traded homemaking for careers, we were implicitly promised economic independence and worldly influence. But a devil of a bargain it has turned out to be in terms of daily life. We gave up the aroma of warm bread rising, the measured pace of nurturing routines, the creative task of molding our families’ tastes and zest for life; we received in exchange the minivan and the Lunchable.” 

The shift away from home-cooked meals to industrially-produced, processed foods is, as Kingsolver rightly points out, a matter of marketing. When many women had to leave their homes and get jobs alongside their husbands, the companies that made the cheaply-produced, over-processed foods flooded their advertisements with promises of saved time, of independence, and similar messages. However, the price of convenience was food of lower quality and sometimes direct negative impacts on consumers’ health.  

“Full-time homemaking may not be an option for those of us delivered without trust funds into the modern era. But approaching mealtimes as a creative opportunity, rather than a chore, is an option. Required participation from spouse and kids is an element of the equation. An obsession with spotless collars, ironing, and kitchen floors you can eat off of—not so much. We've earned the right to forget about stupefying household busywork. But kitchens where food is cooked and eaten, those were really a good idea. We threw that baby out with the bathwater. It may be advisable to grab her by her slippery foot and haul her back in here before it’s too late.” 

While Kingsolver does acknowledge that it is difficult to make time to cook lavish meals when one has a full-time job, she returns again to the idea of a changed mindset. If cooking was seen as a pleasant, wholesome task rather than a chore, then perhaps it would not seem like a burden even for working people. She argues that cooking is not the same as housework, despite advertisements to the contrary, and urges readers to enjoy it.

“A quality diet is not an elitist option for the do-it-yourselfer. Globally speaking, people consume more soft drinks and packaged foods as they grow more affluent; home-cooked meals of fresh ingredients are the mainstay of rural, less affluent people. This link between economic success and nutritional failure has become so widespread, it has a name: the nutrition transition.” 

The idea that only the wealthy can have good food is a false connection, as Kingsolver points out that more affluent people actually eat worse than their less wealthy neighbors. She brings this up, once again, to counter the idea that local, wholesome food is out of reach for the average American. She shores up her argument with facts, like the idea that this tendency goes by the name “the nutrition transition.”

“Many of us who aren’t farmers or gardeners still have some element of farm nostalgia in our family past, real or imagined: a secret longing for some connection to a life where a rooster crows in the yard.” 

Kingsolver asserts that all humans have a visceral connection to farming, as we have all evolved from ancestors who survived due to their understanding of food and its growing process. She brings this up, in part, to point out that there is hope for modern society; if we all have this shared nostalgia and connection to growing things, then it may be possible to reverse bad habits and return to a more wholesome system.

“How we eat determines how the world is used.” 

This is the point of the book in a nutshell—our eating habits are what must change in order to save our health, the health of future generations, and the planet itself. Taking a stand is no more difficult than going the extra mile to buy food locally, from family farmers in our own community. If Americans did that, then there would be little that the conglomerates and industrial farms could do, other than change their marketing message and try again. But Kingsolver’s insistence on mindfulness and education would likely combat even this.

“To believe we can live without taking life is delusional. Humans may only cultivate nonviolence in our diets by degree.” 

Perhaps controversially, Kingsolver dismisses purely vegetarian and vegan lifestyles as impractical. While she does advocate for the humane treatment of animals bred for meat, she also points out the many health benefits of consuming this meat—and the fuel cost of things like supplements on which vegans and some vegetarians depend. 

“Eating establishments where cuisine isn’t the point—is that a strange notion? Maybe, but in the United States we have them galore: fast-food joints where ‘fast’ is the point; cafeterias where it’s all about efficient caloric load; sports bars where the purported agenda is ‘sports’ and the real one is to close down the arteries to the diameter of the pin. In most airport restaurants the premise is ‘captive starving audience.’ In our country it’s a reasonable presumption that unless you have gone out of your way to find good food, you’ll be settling for mediocre at best.” 

Kingsolver’s theme of pointing out the paradoxes of the American food system continues as she explores the fact that the food itself is not often the main purpose of food vendors in the US. Instead, other cultural concerns like convenience and entertainment take center stage at restaurants and eating establishments. She contrasts this with her experience in Italy, where every single restaurant—down to the museum food court—took pride in the food itself. 

“Planning complex, beautiful meals and investing one’s heart and time in their preparation is the opposite of self-indulgence. Kitchen-based family gatherings are process-oriented, cooperative, and in the best of worlds, nourishing and soulful. A lot of calories get used up before anyone sits down to consume. But more importantly, a lot of talk happens first, news exchanged, secrets revealed across generations, paths cleared with a touch on the arm. I have given and received some of my life’s most important hugs with those big oven-mitt potholders on both hands.” 

The act of cooking from scratch, which is to say cooking wholesome, nutritious food, is a family affair for Kingsolver and for most people. This fits neatly with the overall premise and theme of the book. It is not just Kingsolver who has undertaken this experiment. It is the whole family together. Kingsolver, Hopp, Camille, and Lily turn the year of eating local into a family event, creating a through line from narrative to academic argument.