Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [12]
I enjoy denial as much as the next person, but this isn’t rocket science: our kids will eventually have to make food differently. They could be assisted by some familiarity with how vegetables grow from seeds, how animals grow on pasture, and how whole ingredients can be made into meals, gee whiz, right in the kitchen. My husband and I decided our children would not grow up without knowing a potato has a plant part. We would take a food sabbatical, getting our hands dirty in some of the actual dying arts of food production. We hoped to prove—at least to ourselves—that a family living on or near green land need not depend for its life on industrial food. We were writing our Dear John letter to a roomie that smells like exhaust fumes and the feedlot.
But sticking it to the Man (whoever he is) may not be the most inspired principle around which to organize one’s life. We were also after tangible, healthy pleasures, in the same way that boycotting tobacco, for example, brings other benefits besides the satisfaction of withholding your money from Philip Morris. We hoped a year away from industrial foods would taste so good, we might actually enjoy it. The positives, rather than the negatives, ultimately nudged us to step away from the agribusiness supply line and explore the local food landscape. Doing the right thing, in this case, is not about abstinence-only, throwing out bread, tightening your belt, wearing a fake leather belt, or dragging around feeling righteous and gloomy. Food is the rare moral arena in which the ethical choice is generally the one more likely to make you groan with pleasure. Why resist that?
In Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel Zorba the Greek, the pallid narrator frets a lot about his weaknesses of the flesh. He lies awake at night worrying about the infinite varieties of lust that call to him from this world; for example, cherries. He’s way too fond of cherries. Zorba tells him, Well then, I’m afraid what you must do is stand under the tree, collect a big bowl full, and stuff yourself. Eat cherries like they’re going out of season.
This was approximately the basis of our plan: the Zorba diet.
2 • WAITING FOR ASPARAGUS
Late March
A question was nagging at our family now, and it was no longer, “When do we get there?” It was, “When do we start?”
We had come to the farmland to eat deliberately. We’d discussed for several years what that would actually mean. We only knew, somewhat abstractly, we were going to spend a year integrating our food choices with our family values, which include both “love your neighbor” and “try not to wreck every blooming thing on the planet while you’re here.”
We’d given ourselves nearly a year to settle in at the farm and address some priorities imposed by our hundred-year-old farmhouse, such as hundred-year-old plumbing. After some drastic remodeling, we’d moved into a house that still lacked some finishing touches, like doorknobs. And a back door. We nailed plywood over the opening so forest mammals wouldn’t wander into the kitchen.
Between home improvement projects, we did find time that first summer to grow a modest garden and can some tomatoes. In October the sober forests around us suddenly revealed their proclivity for cross-dressing. (Trees in Tucson didn’t just throw on scarlet and orange like this.) Then came the series of snowfalls that comprised the first inclement winter of the kids’ lives. One of our Tucson-bred girls was so dismayed by the cold, she adopted fleece-lined boots as orthodoxy, even indoors; the other was so thrilled with the concept of third grade canceled on account of snow, she kept her sled parked on the porch and developed rituals to enhance the odds.
With our local-food project still ahead of us, we spent time getting to know our farming neighbors and what they grew, but did our grocery shopping in fairly standard fashion.