Last night, I picked up a copy of Barbara Kingsolver's new book _Animal, Vegetable, Mineral_. A couple of folks said to me that they thought I'd like it because of my interest in local agriculture and sustainability. I'm up to page 70, and I am enjoying it. If you have not read it, the plot runs like this: Kingsolver moves from Arizona with her family (two daughters and husband) back to their "summer" farm in southern Appalachia. They have spent many summers there, but they are now going back to live--live off their land and feed themselves locally. The motive is living a more sustainable and connected lifestyle. Kingsolver lyrically describes the family's movement back into the local "foodshed." Her youngest daughter gives up Pop-Tarts. They all give up fresh fruit out of season. She describes the pleasures of gardening: growing asparagus and the coming promise of spring and green eatables.
Kingsolver mentions Gary Nabhan early on in the book. Gary is author of _Coming Home to Eat_, a wonderful book about Nabhan's attempts to eat locally in the Arizona desert. This is not an easy thing because it means making bread of mesquite flour and scavenging local cacti.
So Kingsolver does see herself writing in the genre of "going back to the land," the genre familiar to so many of us from reading _Walden_. As a matter of fact, she mirrors lines from Thoreau.
While there is much to like about Kingsolver's book, I can't help but feel a bit impatient with it even as I am enjoying it. These are familiar moves--write about reconnecting with your own local food shed. Michael Pollan's book _The Omnivore's Dilemma_ deals with this theme, in part, although the scope of his book is larger. This is becoming a rhetorical commonplace in the middle-class writer's life. Tell the story of reconnecting with nature and local food. Humorously describe your own struggles to move away from grocery store consumerism to local food webs. Lyrically describe the green shoots coming up in the garden. Talk about the value of the local farmer. Yadda, yadda, yadda...OK, I'm being too sarcastic.
This book will get people's attention. Barbara Kingsolver is an accomplished writer, she is well-known and much-loved. People will read her book, they will be affected, they will make changes-hopefully. Her husband Steven Hopp has included side bars in the book introducing ecological concepts and sustainable farming. She does point out how High-fructose corn syrup is leading to obesity. She points out the connection between fossil fuel use and food production (food miles--how far food travels to the table). She discusses the public policies that have made local agriculture difficult in the face of industrialized agriculture (The Farm Bill as the Farm Kill). OK, so she does a lot of teaching in this book.
There have been people preaching this message for years: small-scale farmers!!, sustainable farmers, organic farmers, community food security people, Slow Food advocates, farmers' market directors, rural folks with a lick of good sense in their heads. I guess for it to filter into middle class consciousness, it will take someone like Kingsolver or Pollan. Who wants to listen to a real farmer or rural person with a backyard garden?
Again, I'm trying to contain my critique so I can read the book and enjoy it. But I can't help but feel frustrated when I read Kingsolver. What she describes about eating seasonally was what I grew up with. We grew a big garden, canned fruit and vegetables for the winter,, ate locally as much as we could, including wild game. Eating locally, as she pointed out, the way a lot of rural people live and continue to live when they have a plot of land to scratch around in and not much money to burn. We lived this way because it was less money, we had the land, and we had the time, and we were tied ot the seasons and the soil. We lived this way, too, because my mom and Dad were depression era babies who knew that food shortages could happen. Ecology was just common sense, and food from the garden was good and fresh and cheap. Now that doesn't mean, though, that my Dad wasn't spraying pesticides on our commercial apple and pear orchards. He thoroughly bought into industrialized agriculture--after all, he had two degrees from land-grant institutions--WSU and Cornell-- where the latest technology was promoted. After all, the American consumer couldn't accept an apple with worm holes or aphid bites. So our family was contradictory; local food to eat, industrialized growing of apples and pears for export and domestic markets. Some of our apples made the journey by container ship to Japan.
What Kingsolver is trying to accomplish is not only the rendering of her experience, but a strong message about returning to the local--a message directed at those who are disconnected from the local. People will point to her book as a guide or an inspiration. I think it's an important book, but one I feel conflicted about for reasons I'm still figuring out.
Anyway, more to think about.....
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3 comments:
What you've said reminds me of something that proponents of "simple living" claim: that the movement to simplify -- and all that implies -- can't catch on until people are able to make the choice to do it rather than just having to do it. That is, it's hard to ask people who don't have much to regard their state as pleasurable. They haven't felt the "oppression" of wealth yet and still desire it (as attaining it is a big part of the American Dream).
The comparison that I'm trying to draw isn't spot on, but it does remind me of my own food history. I grew up eating locally -- but not from any "good" reason -- but mainly because we were poor and had to plant a garden, can food, hunt deer and groundhog, etc. Did we enjoy this food? Yep. But what did we really enjoy? The "treats" -- white trash food that cost too much (and therefore was a luxury): velveeta cheese, spam, canned soup.
Now that my parents and myself are in a different place -- wealthier, better educated, and so forth -- we've all made the choice to adopt more local food practices again. But I can't help but think that the "choice" aspect had a lot to do with it. Sure, we could all articulate good reasons for it (my dad has a special loathing for the local big-box grocer and appreciates produce at the veggie stand down the street from his house), but I'm beginning to think that with food, the luxury of choice is a powerful motivating tool.
I think this post is interesting, and I understand the conflicting feelings that you are pointing to. But for someone like me, perhaps reading the book would do good.
Here's the deal: I never grew up in a farm-like environment--I started out in the sweltering heat of Ft. Lauderdale and then moved north a bit to a relatively commercial mountain town. My mom and I didn't have much money--the food we ate was cheap and processed--everything bad. I don't think it was until I got quite older that I even realized that food was not just food--that what was put into the delivery of food, the production, etc. mattered. So, here I am now, and the notion of organic, local food has only surfaced for me in the past few years, quite simply because I am still working class.
So, I want to buy organic and locally. Locally, it's cheap--produce, veggies, I can do. But organic is expensive, no matter where it seems to come from. So, it's a dual process: part Lowes food, part local sellers.
Is that a bad kind of system to have?
I was disappointed they weren't a bit more hard core about the rules they laid down. Didn't Stephen still buy and drink coffee (not only exotic but also problematic in terms of globalization on so many levels)?
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