Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [91]
Like our friend David who meditates on Creation while cultivating, I feel lucky to do work that lets me listen to distant thunder and watch a nest of baby chickadees fledge from their hole in the fencepost into the cucumber patch. Even the smallest backyard garden offers emotional rewards in the domain of the little miracle. As a hobby, this one could be considered bird-watching with benefits.
Every gardener I know is a junkie for the experience of being out there in the mud and fresh green growth. Why? An astute therapist might diagnose us as codependent and sign us up for Tomato-Anon meetings. We love our gardens so much it hurts. For their sake we’ll bend over till our backs ache, yanking out fistfuls of quackgrass by the roots as if we are tearing out the hair of the world. We lead our favorite hoe like a dance partner down one long row and up the next, in a dance marathon that leaves us exhausted. We scrutinize the yellow beetles with black polka dots that have suddenly appeared like chickenpox on the bean leaves. We spend hours bent to our crops as if enslaved, only now and then straightening our backs and wiping a hand across our sweaty brow, leaving it striped with mud like some child’s idea of war paint. What is it about gardening that is so addicting?
That longing is probably mixed up with our DNA. Agriculture is the oldest, most continuous livelihood in which humans have engaged. It’s the line of work through which we promoted ourselves from just another primate to Animal-in-Chief. It is the basis for successful dispersal from our original home in Africa to every cold, dry, high, low, or clammy region of the globe. Growing food was the first activity that gave us enough prosperity to stay in one place, form complex social groups, tell our stories, and build our cities. Archaeologists have sturdy evidence that plant and animal domestication both go back 14,000 years in some parts of the world—which makes farming substantially older than what we call “civilization” in any place. All the important crops we now eat were already domesticated around five thousand years ago. Early humans independently followed the same impulse wherever they found themselves, creating small agricultural economies based on the domestication of whatever was at hand: wheat, rice, beans, barley, and corn on various continents, along with sheep in Iraq (around 9000 BC), pigs in Thailand (8000 BC), horses in the Ukraine (5000 BC), and ducks in the Americas (pre-Inca). If you want to know which came first, the chicken-in-every-pot or the politician, that’s an easy answer.
Hunter-gatherers slowly gained the skills to control and increase their food supply, learned to accumulate surplus to feed family groups through dry or cold seasons, and then settled down to build towns, cities, empires, and the like. And when centralization collapses on itself, as it inevitably does, back we go to the family farm. The Roman Empire grew fat on the fruits of huge, corporate, slave-driven agricultural operations, to the near exclusion of any small farms by the end of the era. But when Rome crashed and burned, its urbanized citizenry scurried out to every nook and cranny of Italy’s mountains and valleys, returning once again to the work of feeding themselves and their families. They’re still doing it, famously, to this day.
Where our modern dependence on corporate agriculture is concerned, some signs suggest we might play out our hand a little smarter than Rome did. Industrialized Europe has lately developed suspicions of the centralized food supply, precipitated by mad cow disease and genetically modified foods. The European Union—through government agencies and enforceable laws—is now working to preserve its farmlands, its local food economies, and the authenticity and survival of its culinary specialties.
Here in the United States we are still, statistically speaking, in the thrall of drive-through dining, but we’re not unaware that things