Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [18]
They all sat facing me. Steven: my faithful helpmeet, now quite happy to let me play the heavy. And whose idea this whole thing was in the first place, I’m pretty sure. Camille: our redheaded teenager, who in defiance of all stereotypes has the most even temperament in our family. From birth, this child has calmly studied and solved every problem in her path, never asking for special help from the Universe or her parents. At eighteen she now functioned in our household as a full adult, cooking and planning meals often, and was also a dancer who fueled her calorie-intensive passions with devotedly healthy rations. If this project was going to impose a burden, she would feel it. And finally, Lily: earnest, dark-pig-tailed persuader and politician of our family who could, as my grandfather would say, charm the socks off a snake. I had a hunch she didn’t really know what was coming. Otherwise she’d already be lobbying the loopholes.
Six eyes, all beloved to me, stared unblinking as I crossed the exotics off our shopping list, one by one. All other pastures suddenly looked a whole lot greener than ours. All snack foods come from the land of Oz, it seems, even the healthy ones. Cucumbers, in April? Nope. Those would need passports to reach us right now, or at least a California license. Ditto for those make-believe baby carrots that are actually adult carrots whittled down with a lathe. And all prewashed salad greens emanate from California. Even salad dressing was problematic because of all the ingredients—over a dozen different foods logging their own mileage to get to a salad dressing factory, and then to us. As fuel economy goes, I suppose the refrigerated tropicals like bananas and pineapples are the Humvees of the food world, but multi-ingredient concoctions are sneaky sports cars. I drew a pencil line through one item after another. “Salad dressing is easy to make,” I said. The vinegar and oil in our pantry were not local, of course, but with a small effort, thirty seconds spent shaking things together in a jar, we could improve the gas mileage of our vinaigrette. In the herb garden we already had garlic chives and oregano, the hardiest of the spicy Mediterranean perennials, braving the frosts of late winter.
We were getting plenty of local eggs too, so in a reckless burst of confidence I promised to make mayonnaise. It’s supposed to be pretty easy. I had a recipe I’d been saving since my high school French class, waiting for the right time to try it, because of one irresistible step that translates as follows: “Whip heartily for two minutes while holding only pleasant thoughts in mind.”
Back to the grocery list, trying for that positive mindset: a few more items fell without significant protest. Then I came to block letters in Camille’s hand, underlined: FRESH FRUIT, PLEASE???
We were about to cross the Rubicon.
I shifted tactics. Instead of listing what we can’t have, I said, we should outline what we knew we could get locally. Vegetables and meat—which constitute the bulk of our family’s diet—would be available in some form throughout the coming year. We had met or knew of farmers in our county who sold pasture-fed chickens, turkeys, beef, lamb, and pork. Many more were producing vegetables. Like so many other towns, large and small, ours holds a farmers’ market where local growers set up booths twice a week from mid-April to October. Soon our garden would also be feeding us. Our starting point would be this: we would take a loyalty oath to our own county’s meat and produce, forsaking all others, however sexy the veggies and flesh of California might be.
What else does a family need? Honey would do instead of sugar, in a county where beekeepers are as thick as thieves. Eggs, too, were an easy local catch. Highly processed convenience foods we try to avoid, so those would not be a problem categorically. The other food groups we use in quantity are grains, dairy, and olive oil. We knew of some good dairies in our state, but olives don’t grow in this climate. No reasonable substitute exists,