Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [36]
In many social circles it’s ordinary for hosts to accommodate vegetarian guests, even if they’re carnivores themselves. Maybe the world would likewise become more hospitable to diners who are queasy about fuel-guzzling foods, if that preference had a name. Petrolophobes? Seasonal-tarians? Local eaters, Homeys? Lately I’ve begun seeing the term locavores, and I like it: both scientifically and socially descriptive, with just the right hint of “Livin’ la vida loca.”
Slow Food International has done a good job of putting a smile on this eating style, rather than a pious frown, even while sticking to the quixotic agenda of fighting overcentralized agribusiness. The engaging strategy of the Slowies (their logo is a snail) is to celebrate what we have, standing up for the pleasures that seasonal eating can bring. They have their work cut out for them, as the American brain trust seems mostly blank on that subject. Consider the frustration of the man who wrote in this complaint to a food columnist: having studied the new food pyramid brought to us by the U.S. Dietary Guidelines folks (impossible to decipher but bless them, they do keep trying), he had his marching orders for “2 cups of fruit, 2½ cups of vegetables a day.” So he marched down to his grocery and bought (honest to Pete) eighty-three plums, pears, peaches, and apples. Outraged, he reported that virtually the entire lot was “rotten, mealy, tasteless, juiceless, or hard as a rock and refusing to ripen.”
Given the date of the column, this had occurred in February or March. The gentleman lived in Frostburg, Maryland, where they would still have been deeply involved in a thing called winter. I’m sure he didn’t really think tasty tree-ripened plums, peaches, and apples were hanging outside ripe for the picking in the orchards around…um, Frost-burg. Probably he didn’t think “orchard” at all—how many of us do, in the same sentence with “fruit”? Our dietary guidelines come to us without a roadmap.
Concentrating on local foods means thinking of fruit invariably as the product of an orchard, and a winter squash as the fruit of an early-winter farm. It’s a strategy that will keep grocery money in the neighborhood, where it gets recycled into your own school system and local businesses. The green spaces surrounding your town stay green, and farmers who live nearby get to grow more food next year, for you. But before any of that, it’s a win-win strategy for anyone with taste buds. It begins with rethinking a position that is only superficially about deprivation. Citizens of frosty worlds unite, and think about marching past the off-season fruits: you have nothing to lose but mealy, juiceless, rock-hard and refusing to ripen.
5 •MOLLY MOOCHING
April
In the year 1901, Sanford Webb ran a dozen head of cattle on his new farm and watched to see where they settled down every night. The place they chose, he reasoned, would be the most sheltered spot in the hollow. That was where he built his house, with clapboard sides, a steep tin roof, and a broad front porch made of river rock. The milled door frames and stair rails he ordered from Sears, Roebuck. He built the house for his new bride, Lizzie, and the children they would raise here—eleven in all—during the half-century to come.
In the 1980s those children put the home place up for sale. They weren’t keen to do it, but had established farmsteads of their own by the time their parents passed away. All were elderly now, and none was in a position to move back to the family farm and fix up the home place. They decided to let it go out of the family.
Steven walked into this picture, and a deal with fate was sealed. He didn’t know that. He was looking for a bargain fixer-upper he could afford on his modest academic salary, a quiet place to live where he could listen to the birds