Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [0]
A Year of Food Life
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver
ORIGINAL DRAWINGS BY RICHARD A. HOUSER
Dedication
In memory of Jo Ellen
CONTENTS
Dedication
1. Called Home
2. Waiting for Asparagus: Late March
3. Springing Forward
4. Stalking the Vegetannual
5. Molly Mooching: April
6. The Birds and the Bees
7. Gratitude: May
8. Growing Trust: Mid-June
9. Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: Late June
10. Eating Neighborly: Late June
11. Slow Food Nations: Late June
12. Zucchini Larceny: July
13. Life in a Red State: August
14. You Can’t Run Away on Harvest Day: September
15. Where Fish Wear Crowns: September
16. Smashing Pumpkins: October
17. Celebration Days: November–December
18. What Do You Eat in January?
19. Hungry Month: February–March
20. Time Begins
Acknowledgments
References
Organizations
Sidebar Resources
About the Authors
Books by Barbara Kingsolver
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
“Picture a single imaginary plant, bearing throughout one season all the different vegetables we harvest…we’ll call it a vegetannual.”
1 • CALLED HOME
This story about good food begins in a quick-stop convenience market. It was our family’s last day in Arizona, where I’d lived half my life and raised two kids for the whole of theirs. Now we were moving away forever, taking our nostalgic inventory of the things we would never see again: the bush where the roadrunner built a nest and fed lizards to her weird-looking babies; the tree Camille crashed into learning to ride a bike; the exact spot where Lily touched a dead snake. Our driveway was just the first tributary on a memory river sweeping us out.
One person’s picture postcard is someone else’s normal. This was the landscape whose every face we knew: giant saguaro cacti, coyotes, mountains, the wicked sun reflecting off bare gravel. We were leaving it now in one of its uglier moments, which made good-bye easier, but also seemed like a cheap shot—like ending a romance right when your partner has really bad bed hair. The desert that day looked like a nasty case of prickly heat caught in a long, naked wince.
This was the end of May. Our rainfall since Thanksgiving had measured less than one inch. The cacti, denizens of deprivation, looked ready to pull up roots and hitch a ride out if they could. The prickly pears waved good-bye with puckered, grayish pads. The tall, dehydrated saguaros stood around all teetery and sucked-in like very prickly supermodels. Even in the best of times desert creatures live on the edge of survival, getting by mostly on vapor and their own life savings. Now, as the southerntier of U.S. states came into a third consecutive year of drought, people elsewhere debated how seriously they should take global warming. We were staring it in the face.
Away went our little family, like rats leaping off the burning ship. It hurt to think about everything at once: our friends, our desert, old home, new home. We felt giddy and tragic as we pulled up at a little gas-and-go market on the outside edge of Tucson. Before we set off to seek our fortunes we had to gas up, of course, and buy snacks for the road. We did have a cooler in the back seat packed with respectable lunch fare. But we had more than two thousand miles to go. Before we crossed a few state lines we’d need to give our car a salt treatment and indulge in some things that go crunch.
This was the trip of our lives. We were ending our existence outside the city limits of Tucson, Arizona, to begin a rural one in southern Appalachia. We’d sold our house and stuffed the car with the most crucial things: birth certificates, books-on-tape, and a dog on drugs. (Just for the trip, I swear.) All other stuff would come in the moving van. For better or worse, we would soon be living on a farm.
For twenty years Steven had owned a piece of land in the southern Appalachians with a farmhouse, barn, orchards and fields, and a tax zoning known as “farm use.” He was living there when I met him, teaching college and