Book 39: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: a Year of Food Life
by Barbara Kingsolver with Stephen L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver
In this book, one of my favorite authors describes a year-long experiment her family underwent to eat locally - food grown and produced within their own rural Virginia county - as much as possible. (Exceptions were planned from the beginning for olive oil, wheat flour, coffee, and chocolate). The story moves between what the family is experiencing as they live their experiment and factual information about agribusiness and processed foods that made my blood boil (see behind the cut for some quotes from the book).
The book also has a lot of information about gardening or plants that was new to me, such as: asparagus as we see it in the grocery store is about a day's growth, and it is only when the plant is three years old that you can start harvesting it. After a peanut plant flowers and is pollinated, it will then grow downward so that the seed heads develop underground. Free-range, pasture-fed, "grass finished" meat and poultry is much better for you that the meat of animals grown in feed lots eating grain, which is not their natural food supply (see more behind the cut below on this topic).
The author and family live on a farm and are able to grow quite a large portion of their food (vegetables, fruit, eggs, poultry) themselves. This is a big time investment, between all the gardening, weeding, and canning and freezing food for winter. They don't eat a lot of fresh fruit in winter and spring and get tired of tomatoes and zucchini in the summer. They didn't eat out very much. They make their own cheese from local milk and use a bread-maker to make their own bread. They have a tradition of homemade pizza for dinner every Friday (sounds like a good tradition to me!) which can accommodate whatever is in season. The family also raised a flock of heirloom turkeys, Bourbon Reds, and wanted to establish a breeding herd - but with over 99% of turkeys now being conceived by artificial insemination (!) found this to be a big challenge.
There was something about eating locally that struck a very deep chord with me. There is the environmental aspect, the taking a stance against global climate change. There is the sustainability aspect, the organic gardening and growing your own food or supporting local farmers and the local economy. There is my own long-term battle with weight and food, which connects to the nutrition aspect, as local, organic produce and meats are better for you, and eating whole foods is so much better that processed foods anyway. There is the aspect of living what I believe in. There is the aspect of community building and getting to know your neighbors. There is the spiritual aspect, following the wheel of the year by eating what is in season locally, the season you live in. There is something about local food that brings all these pieces together.
I am lucky to have a yard big enough to grow some food, although not a lot of space or good sunlight exposure. I have gardened organically the three years I have lived here, but I do have deep concerns about being next door to an auto-body shop (sometimes we can smell the aerosol paint inside our house when the windows are open). I certainly don't have the space or time to grow my own food to the extent that Kingsolver can, but I am inspired to extend my growing season with some vegetables I have not tried before. I am also inspired to do a lot more shopping via the farmer's markets (including meat and cheese, for example) and to do some canning next summer. And I think I will be more choosy in the grocery store.
Eaters must understand, how we eat determines how the world is used. Kingsolver describes a local operation that collects local, organic produce from farmer's and sells them to grocery stores, thereby opening markets for farmers and taking care of the very expensive organic certification. This worked really well until the grocery stores were able to get organic tomatoes shipped from California for cheaper, thereby forcing the local tomatoes to be thrown away or given away to the local hungry (211).
Knigsolver says she often cooks vegetarian, but includes an argument against vegetarianism in the book. While it may be true that it takes 10 times as much land to grow the grain to produce a pound of meat than to grow the grain, this leaves out of the equation that ruminants (camels, reindeer, sheep, goats, cattle, etc.) evolved to feed off of indigestible cellulose (grass, shrubs, wood tree pods) not grains. And that many parts of the world - the fringes of desert, tundra, marginal grasslands, the American West - cannot grow grains but can support ruminants. In fact, in an arid, deforested region of Peru, goats are helping bring back native mesquite forests and improving the lives of farmers in those areas (yay Heifer International!) Kingsolver argues that bananas, shipped from around the world, do more damage than eating the beef of a cow that grew up down the road (225-226).
"Eggs from chickens that ranged freely on grass have about half of the cholesterol of factory-farmed eggs, and it's mostly LDL, the cholesterol that's good for you. They also have more vitamin E, beta-carotene and omega-3 fatty acids that their cooped-up counterparts. The more pasture time a chicken is allowed, the greater these differences. As with the chickens, the nutritional benefits in beef are directly proportional to the fraction of the steer's life it spent at home on the range eating grass instead of grain-gruel. Free-range beef also has less danger of bacterial contamination because feeding on grass maintains normal levels of acidity in the animal's stomach... high-acid stomachs of grain-fed cattle commonly harbor acid-resistant strains of E. coli that are vary dangerous to humans" (23940).
From a section on the Day of the Dead: "When Aztec people left their bodies, they were presumed to be on an exciting trip through the ether. It wasn't something to cry about, except that the living still wanted to visit with them. People's sadness was not for the departed, but for themselves, and could addressed through ritual visiting called Xantolo, and ordinary communion between the dead and the living. Mexican tradition still holds that Xantolo is always present in certain places and activities, including wild marigold fields, the cultivation of corn, the preparation of tamales and pan de muerto. Interestingly, farmers' markets are said to be loaded with Xantolo" (290).
"Several cross-cultural studies ... have shown lower rates of depression and bipolar disorder in populations consuming more seafood; neurological studies reveal that it's the omega-3 fatty acids in ocean fish that specifically combat the blues. These compounds (also important to cardiovascular health) accumulate in the bodies of predators whose food chains are founded on plankton or grass - like tuna and salmon. And like humans used to be, before our food animals all went over to indoor dining.... in most modern Western diets 'we eat grossly fewer omega-3 fatty acids now. We also know that rates of depression have radically increased, by perhaps a hundred-fold'" (300).
Recipes from the book and lots of information on local foods can be found at www.animalvegetablemiracle.com