Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [106]
Most rural people of my acquaintance would not gladly give up their status. Like other minorities, we’ve managed to turn several of the aforementioned slurs into celebrated cultural identifiers (for use by insiders only). In my own life I’ve had ample opportunity to reinvent myself as a city person—to pass, as it were—but I’ve remained tacitly rural-identified in my psyche, even while living in some of the world’s major cities. It’s probably this dual citizenship that has sensitized me to my nation’s urbanrural antipathy, and how it affects people in both camps. Rural concerns are less covered by the mainstream media, and often considered intrinsically comic. Corruption in city governments is reported as grim news everywhere; from small towns (or Tennessee) it is fodder for talk-show jokes. Thomas Hardy wrote about the sort of people who milked cows, but writers who do so in the modern era will be dismissed as marginal. The policy of our nation is made in cities, controlled largely by urban voters who aren’t well informed about the changes on the face of our land, and the men and women who work it.
Those changes can be mapped on worry lines: as the years have gone by, as farms have gone out of business, America has given an ever-smaller cut of each food dollar (now less than 19 percent) to its farmers. The psychic divide between rural and urban people is surely a part of the problem. “Eaters must understand,” Wendell Berry writes, “that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act, and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used.” Eaters must, he claims, but it sure looks like most eaters don’t. If they did, how would we frame the sentence suggested by today’s food-buying habits, directed toward today’s farmers? “Let them eat dirt” is hardly overstating it. The urban U.S. middle class appears more specifically concerned about exploited Asian factory workers.
Symptomatic of this rural-urban identity crisis is our eager embrace of a recently imposed divide: the Red States and the Blue States. That color map comes to us with the suggestion that both coasts are populated by educated civil libertarians, while the vast middle and south are crisscrossed with the studded tracks of ATVs leaving a trail of flying beer cans and rebel yells. Okay, I’m exaggerating a little. But I certainly sense a bit of that when urban friends ask me how I can stand living here, “so far from everything?” (When I hear this question over the phone, I’m usually looking out the window at a forest, a running creek, and a vegetable garden, thinking: Define everything.) Otherwise sensitive coastal-dwelling folk may refer to the whole chunk of our continent lying between the Cascades and the Hudson River as “the Interior.” I gather this is now a common designation. It’s hard for me to see the usefulness of lumping Minneapolis, Atlanta, my little hometown in Kentucky, Yellowstone Park, and so forth, into a single category that does not include New York and California. “Going into the Interior” sounds like an endeavor that might require machetes to hack through the tangled vines.
In fact, the politics of rural regions are no more predictable than those in cities. “Conservative” is a reasonable position for a farmer who can lose home and livelihood all in one year by taking a risk on a new crop. But that’s conservative as in, “eager to conserve what we have, reluctant to change the rules overnight,” and unrelated to how the term is currently (often incomprehensibly) applied in party politics. The farm county where I grew up had so few Republicans, they all registered Democrat so they could vote in the only local primary. My earliest understanding of radical, class-conscious politics came from miners’ strikes in one of the most rural parts of my state, and of our nation.
The only useful generalization I’d hazard