Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [171]
It wasn’t just our family, either, that had changed in a year. Food was now very much a subject of public conversation—not recipes, but issues. When we’d first dreamed up our project, we’d expected our hardest task would be to explain in the most basic terms what we were doing, and why on earth we’d bother. Now our local newspaper and national ones frequently had local-food feature stories on the same day. Every state had it going on, including Arizona, the food scene we feared we had left for dead. Alaska was experiencing a farmers’ market boom, with the “Alaska Grown” logo showing up on cloth shopping bags all over Anchorage. Tod Murphy’s Farmers Diner, in order to accommodate more diners, had relocated south to Quechee Village, Vermont (near Hanover, NH). Other like-minded eateries now lay in the path of many a road trip. Hundreds of people were signing up online and reporting on their “Locavore Month” experiences. We had undertaken a life change partly as a reaction against living in a snappily-named-diet culture; now this lifestyle had its own snappy diet name: “The 100-Mile Diet Challenge!” What a shock. We were trendy.
As further proof that the movement had gained significance, local eating now had some official opposition. The standard criticisms of local food as Quixotic and elitist seemed to get louder, as more and more of us found it affordable and utterly doable. The Christian Science Monitor even ran a story on how so much local focus could breed “unhealthy provincialism.” John Clark, a development specialist for (where else) the World Bank, argued that “what are sweatshop jobs for us may be a dream job” for someone else—presumably meaning those folks who earn a few dreamy bucks a day from Dole, Kraft, Unilever, or Archer Daniel Midlands—“but all that goes out the window if we only buy local.” He expressed concern that local-food bias would lead to energy waste, as rabidly provincial consumers drove farmers in icy climes to grow bananas in hothouses.
That’s some creative disapproval, all right—a sure sign the local-food movement was getting worrisome to food industrialists who had heretofore controlled consumer choices so handily, even when they damaged our kids’ health and our neighborhoods. Shoppers were starting to show some backbone, clearly shifting certain preferences about what foods they purchased, and from where. An estimated 3 percent of the national supply of fresh produce had moved directly from farmers to customers that year.
The “why bother” part of the equation was also becoming obvious to more people. Global climate change had gone, in one year, from unmentionable to cover story. “The end of the oil economy” was now being discussed by some politicians and many economists, not just tree huggers and Idaho survivalists. We were starting to get it.
But it’s also true what the strategists say about hearts and minds—you have to win them both. We will change our ways significantly as a nation not when some laws tell us we have to (remember Prohibition?), but when we want to. During my family’s year of conscious food choices, the most important things we’d learned were all about that: the wanting to. Our fretful minds had started us on a project of abstinence from industrial food, but we finished it with our hearts. We were not counting down the days until the end, because we didn’t want to go back.
A few days after my momentary chest-deep-in-food fantasy, we had dinner with our friends Sylvain and Cynthia. Sylvain grew up in the Loire Valley, where local food is edible patriotism, and I sensed a kindred spirit from the way he celebrated every bite of our salad, inhaling the spice of the