Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [29]
The loss of that mongrel vigor puts food systems at risk. Crop failure is a possibility all farmers understand, and one reason why the traditional farmstead raised many products, both animal and vegetable, unlike the monocultures now blanketing our continent’s midsection. History has regularly proven it drastically unwise for a population to depend on just a few varieties for the majority of its sustenance. The Irish once depended on a single potato, until the potato famine rewrote history and truncated many family trees. We now depend similarly on a few corn and soybean strains for the majority of calories (both animal and vegetable) eaten by U.S. citizens. Our addiction to just two crops has made us the fattest people who’ve ever lived, dining just a few pathogens away from famine.
Woe is us, we overfed, undernourished U.S. citizens—we are eating poorly for so very many reasons. A profit-driven, mechanized food industry has narrowed down our variety and overproduced corn and soybeans. But we let other vegetables drop from the menu without putting up much of a fight. In our modern Café Dysfunctional, “eat your vegetables” has become a battle cry of mothers against presumed unwilling subjects. In my observed experience, boys in high school cafeterias treat salad exactly as if it were a feminine hygiene product, and almost nobody touches the green beans. Broccoli was famously condemned in the 1990s from the highest office in the land. What’s a mother to do? Apparently, she’s to shrug and hand the kids a gigantic cup of carbonated corn syrup. Corn is a vegetable, right? Good, because on average we’re consuming 54.8 gallons of soft drinks, per person, per year.
Mom is losing, no doubt, because our vegetables have come to lack two features of interest: nutrition and flavor. Storage and transport take predictable tolls on the volatile plant compounds that subtly add up to taste and food value. Breeding to increase shelf life also has tended to decrease palatability. Bizarre as it seems, we’ve accepted a tradeoff that amounts to: “Give me every vegetable in every season, even if it tastes like a cardboard picture of its former self.” You’d think we cared more about the idea of what we’re eating than about what we’re eating. But then, if you examine the history of women’s footwear, you’d think we cared more about the idea of showing off our feet than about, oh, for example, walking. Humans can be fairly ridiculous animals.
I wouldn’t dare predict what will happen next with women’s footwear, but I did learn recently that the last couturier in China who made shoes for bound feet is about to go out of business (his last customers are all in their nineties), and in a similar outburst of good sense, the fashion in vegetables may come back around to edibility. Heirlooms now sometimes appear by name on restaurant menus, and are becoming an affordable mainstay of farmers’ markets. Flavor in food is a novelty that seems to keep customers coming back.
Partly to supply this demand, and partly because some people have cared all along, national and international networks exist solely to allow farmers and gardeners to exchange and save each other’s heirloom seeds. The Seed Savers’ Exchange, headquartered on a farm in Decorah, Iowa, was founded by Diane and Kent Whealy after Diane’s grandfather left her the seeds