Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [64]
I have a farmer friend who would definitely side with my grandfather on the subject of time’s economies. He uses draft animals instead of a tractor. Doesn’t it take an eternity to turn a whole field with a horse-driven plow? The answer, he says, is yes. Eternal is the right frame of mind. “When I’m out there cultivating the corn with a good team in the quiet of the afternoon, watching the birds in the hedgerows, oh my goodness, I could just keep going all day. Kids from the city come out here and ask, ‘What do you do for fun around here?’ I tell them, ‘I cultivate.’”
Now that I’m decades older and much less clever than I was in college, I’m getting better at facing life’s routines the way my friend faces his cornfield. I haven’t mastered the serene mindset on all household chores (What do you do for fun around here? I scrub pots and pans, okay??), but I might be getting there with cooking. Eternal is the right frame of mind for making food for a family: cooking down the tomatoes into a red-gold oregano-scented sauce for pasta. Before that, harvesting sun-ripened fruits, pinching oregano leaves from their stems, growing these things from seed—yes. A lifetime is what I’m after. Cooking is definitely one of the things we do for fun around here. When I’m in a blue mood I head for the kitchen. I turn the pages of my favorite cookbooks, summoning the prospective joyful noise of a shared meal. I stand over a bubbling soup, close my eyes, and inhale. From the ground up, everything about nourishment steadies my soul.
Yes, I have other things to do. For nineteen years I’ve been nothing but a working mother, one of the legions who could justify a lot of packaged, precooked foods if I wanted to feed those to my family. I have no argument with convenience, on principle. I’m inordinately fond of my dishwasher, and I like the shiny tools that lie in my kitchen drawers, ready to make me a menace to any vegetable living or dead. I know the art of the quickie supper for after-a-long-day nights, and sometimes if we’re too weary we’ll go out to a restaurant, mainly to keep the kitchen clean.
But if I were to define my style of feeding my family, on a permanent basis, by the dictum, “Get it over with, quick,” something cherished in our family life would collapse. And I’m not just talking waistlines, though we’d miss those. I’m discussing dinnertime, the cornerstone of our family’s mental health. If I had to quantify it, I’d say 75 percent of my crucial parenting effort has taken place during or surrounding the time our family convenes for our evening meal. I’m sure I’m not the only parent to think so. A survey of National Merit scholars—exceptionally successful eighteen-year-olds crossing all lines of ethnicity, gender, geography, and class—turned up a common thread in their lives: the habit of sitting down to a family dinner table. It’s not just the food making them brilliant. It’s probably the parents—their care, priorities, and culture of support. The words: “I’ll expect you home for dinner.”
I understand that most U.S. citizens don’t have room in their lives to grow food or even see it growing. But I have trouble accepting the next step in our journey toward obligate symbiosis with the packaged meal and takeout. Cooking is a dying art in our culture. Why is a good question, and an uneasy one, because I find myself politically and socioeconomically entangled in the answer. I belong to the generation of women who took as our youthful rallying cry: Allow us a good education so we won’t have to slave in the kitchen. We recoiled from the proposition that keeping a husband presentable and fed should be our highest intellectual aspiration. We fought for entry as equal partners into every quarter of the labor force. We went to school, sweated those exams, earned our professional stripes, and we beg therefore to be excused from manual labor. Or else our full-time job is manual labor, we are carpenters or steelworkers, or we stand at a cash register all day. At the end of a shift we deserve to go home and put our feet up. Somehow,