Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [168]
The alternative possibility, a lot of botched hatchlings, made me sad. The temptation is to save the individual that pulls on your heartstrings, even at the cost of the breed. When I’d signed on to the small club of heritage animal breeders, part of the deal was refraining from this kind of sentimentality. Poor mothering instincts, runts, and genetic weaklings all have to be culled. In a human-centric world that increasingly (and wisely, in my opinion) defines all humans as intrinsically equal, it’s hard not to color this thinking outside of the lines. But the rules for healthy domestic animal populations are entirely unlike those we apply to ourselves. I came up against this when trying to explain to my nephew why we can’t let the white rooster mate with the brown hens. I decided to drop the subject for a few years. But I’ll bring it up again if he asks, because it’s important information: respect takes different forms for different species. The apple tree gains strength from strict breeding and regular pruning. So does the herd.
Our purpose for keeping heritage animals is food-system security, but also something else that is less self-serving: the dignity of each breed’s true and specific nature. A Gloucester Old Spots hog in the pasture, descended from her own ancient line, making choices, minute by minute, about rooting for grubs and nursing her young, contains in her life a sensate and intelligent “pigness.” It’s a state of animal grace that never even touches the sausages-on-hooves in an industrial pig lot. One can only hope they’ve lost any sense of the porcine dignities stolen from them.
If it seems a stretch to use the word dignity in the same sentence with pig, or especially turkey, that really proves my point. It was never their plan to let stupid white eunuchs take over, it was ours, and now the genuine, self-propagating turkeys with astute mothering instincts are all but lost from the world. My Bourbon Reds and I had come through hard times together, and I was still rooting for them. They had grown up handsome and strong, disease free, good meat producers, efficient pasture foragers.
I found myself deeply invested in the next step: I wanted them to make it to the next generation on their own. Natural Childbirth or Bust. All my eggs were in one basket now. If they dropped it, we’d have pumpkin soup next Thanksgiving.
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Taking Local On the Road
BY CAMILLE
I have a confession to make. Five months into my family’s year of devoted local eating, I moved out. Not because the hours of canning tomatoes in early August drove me insane or because I was overcome by insatiable cravings for tropical fruit. I just went to college. It was a challenging life, getting through chemistry and calculus while adjusting to a whole new place, and the limited dining options I had as a student living on campus didn’t help. I suppose I could have hoed up a personal vegetable patch on the quad or filled my dorm room with potted tomato and zucchini plants, but then people would really have made fun of me for being from Appalachia. Instead, I ate lettuce and cucumbers in January just like all the other kids.
Living away from home, talking with my family over the phone, gave me some perspective. Not having fresh produce at my disposal made me realize how good it is. I also noticed that how I think about food is pretty unusual among my peers. When I perused the salad bar at my dining hall most evenings, grimly surveying the mealy, pinkish tomatoes and paperlike iceberg lettuce, I could pick out what probably came from South America or New Zealand. I always kept this information to myself (because who really cares when there are basketball games and frat parties to talk about?), but I couldn’t help noticing it.
I suppose my generation is farther removed from food production than any other, just one more step down the path of the American food industry.