Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [115]
We cranky environmentalists tend to nurture a hunch that humans and our food systems are always dangerous to the earth. But when I visited Piura to study the mesquite-goat project, I could not name any measure by which the project was anything but successful. The “before” scenario involved malnourished families in a desiccated brown landscape. Within a few years after receiving goats, the families still lived in simple mud-and-lath homes, but their villages were shaded by green oases of fast-growing native vegetation. They milked the goats, made cheese, burned mesquite pods for cooking fuel, and looked forward to eating meat several times each month. Small, irrigated gardens of beans and leafy greens provided supplementary nutrition, but in this climate it’s animal products that can offer the prospect of ending malnutrition. Each goat-owning family makes an agreement with the donor organizations (Heifer International and the local group ACBIODESA) to give the first female offspring to another family, thus moving their own status from “poor” to “benefactor”—a powerfully important distinction in terms of local decision-making and further stewardship of the land. For the same money, a shipment of donated wheat, rice, or corn would only have maintained the region’s widespread poverty through another few months, and deepened its environmental crisis. Between vegetable or animal solutions to that region’s problems, my vote goes to the goats.
The mountainous part of the United States where I live, though neither destitute nor desiccated, has its own challenges. The farms here are small and steep. Using diesel tractors to turn the earth every spring (where that’s even possible) sends our topsoil downhill into the creeks with every rain, creating many problems at once. One of the region’s best options for feeding ourselves and our city neighbors may be pasture-based hoof stock and poultry. Cattle, goats, sheep, turkeys, and chickens all have their own efficient ways of turning steep, grass-covered hillsides into food, while fertilizing the land discreetly with their manure. They do it without drinking a drop of gasoline.
Managed grazing is healthier for most landscapes, in fact, than annual tilling and planting, and far more fuel-efficient. Grass is a solar-powered, infinitely renewable resource. As consumers discover the health benefits of grass-based meat, more farmers may stop plowing land and let animals go to work on it instead. A crucial part of this enterprise involves recovering the heritage cattle, poultry, and other livestock that can fatten on pasture grass. It’s news to most people that chickens, turkeys, and pigs can eat foliage at all, since we’re used to seeing them captive and fed. Even cattle are doing less and less grass-eating, since twentieth-century breeding programs gave us animals that tolerate (barely) a grain-based diet for weight gain during their final eight months in confinement. For decades, the public has demanded no meat animals but these.
More lately, though, conditions inside CAFOs have been exposed by voices as diverse as talk-show host Oprah Winfrey and Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser. In an essay titled “Food with a Face,” journalist Michael Pollan wrote: “More than any other institution, the American industrial animal farm offers a nightmarish glimpse of what Capitalism can look like in the absence of moral or regulatory constraint. Here, in these places,