Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [178]
For fresh fruits and vegetables, consider travel distance. On an autumn trip to our grocery I found apples grown in a neighboring state (North Carolina), Washington State, and New Zealand. That choice is easy. If we lived in Oregon, that would be a different easy choice.
Consider how you feel about using energy to move water. All fresh produce contains a lot of it. Apparent differences between more and less juicy items can be deceiving: watermelon is 92 percent water; cucumbers 96 percent; tomatoes 95 percent, while on the firmer side, carrots are 92 percent; peppers 94 percent; and broccoli 91 percent. All watery. If you care about this, when considering world travelers, favor dried fruits or vegetables, dried spices, nuts, coffee beans, dry beans, and grains.
If produce or a processed item needs to be refrigerated (or frozen), energy was used to keep it cool from its point of origin to you. How can you tell? It’s refrigerated (or frozen) in the store!
Should you buy industrial organics? By shifting to organic methods, corporate farms are reducing the pesticide loads in our soil and water, in a big way. This should be one of many considerations, along with everything listed above.
How local is local? Our friend Gary Nabhan, in his book Coming Home to Eat, defined it as a 250-mile-radius circle for the less-productive desert Southwest. By contrast, the Bay Area group Locavores (www.locavores.com) recommends a 100-mile-radius circle for the more fertile California valleys. It depends on the region, and the product. For us, in Appalachia, seasonal vegetables are literally next door, but our dairy products come from about 120 miles away. That’s better, we think, than 1,200, which is also an option in our store. We bear in mind our different concerns: fuel use, pesticide use, quality, and support for farms. By pushing the market with our buying habits, we continually shape our buying choices, and the nature of farming.
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STEVEN L. HOPP
Or maybe she was starting to sense what I hated to admit: that these eggs were dead. A hundred things can go wrong with the first breeding attempt of an animal that was not even selected, to begin with, for its reproductive wits. Infertility is common in first-year males, compounded by the incompetent mating attempts of creatures reared by humans. Bacteria in the nest can stealthily destroy the embryos. Improper incubation is also fatal. Had the mother left the nest, on one of the freezing nights we were still having in late April? She seemed dedicated, but lacked experience. She might, just once, have flown up to the roost to get warm among her child-free peers. One hour of that kind of exposure could kill the developing chicks.
Increasingly glum, I had no good news to report on Thursday morning when I came back to the house from my crack-of-dawn nest check. And now we had to leave the farm. I was due that evening in North Carolina for an event that had been scheduled for a year. Steven and Lily were going along too, since we planned a quick visit with Camille at college. At noon, in my earrings and dress shoes, I was still dithering in the poultry house, postponing our drive till the last minute on the grounds that a hatch would probably happen in the warmest part of the day. In truth, I couldn’t bear to leave my expectant mother, though I knew the feeling was not at all mutual. Steven assured me that she could manage without me. Kindly, he did not say, “Honey, it’s a turkey.” I sighed, threw my overnight bag into the car, and off we went.
The event went without a hitch. I delivered my lecture from the pulpit of a magnificent gothic chapel and did not even once mention poultry. The book signing afterward went on until midnight, but still I was up before dawn the next day, pacing in our hotel room. As soon as the