Transcription Series: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
This book needs to go back to the library today -- can't renew it because other people have put holds on it. Glad I finished the book. It's amazing and I can't recommend it enough!
There are so many little excerpts from the book that I want to keep, so I thought I'd post them here, where I can share them with you.
Knowing how foods grow is to know how and when to look for them; such expertise is useful for certain kinds of people, namely, the ones who eat, no matter where they live or grocery shop.
Absence of that knowledge has rendered us a nation of wary label-readers, oddly uneasy in our obligate relationship with the things we eat. We call our food animals by different names after they're dead, presumably sparing ourselves any vision of the beefs and the porks running around on actual hooves. Our words for unhealthy contamination -- "soiled" or "dirty" -- suggest that if we really knew the number-one ingredient of a garden, we'd head straight into therapy. I used to take my children's friends out to the garden to warm them up to the idea of eating vegetables, but this strategy sometimes backfired: they'd back away slowly saying, "Oh man, those things touched dirt!" Adults do the same by pretending it all comes from the clean, well-lighted grocery store. We're like petulant teenagers rejecting our mother. We know we came out of her, but ee-ew.
We don't know beans about beans. Asparagus, potatoes, turkey drumsticks -- you name it, we don't have a clue how the world makes it. I usually think I'm exaggerating the scop of the problem, and then I'll encounter an editor (at a well-known nature magazine) who's nixing the part of my story that refers to pineapples growing from the ground. She insisted they grew on trees. Or, I'll have a conversation like this one:
"What's new on the farm?" asks my friend, a lifelong city dweller who likes for me to keep her posted by phone. She's a gourmet cook, she cares about the world, and has been around a lot longer than I have. This particular conversation was in early spring, so I told her what was up in the garden: peas, potatoes, spinach.
"What a minute," she said. "When you say, 'The potatoes are up,' what do you mean?" She paused, formulating her question: "What part of a potato comes up?"
"Um, the plant part," I said. "The stem and leaves."
"Wow," she said. "I never knew a potato had a plant part." pp. 10-11
FTR, here's a lovely picture montage of how potatoes grow, with the upper parts and the lower parts:
http://www.potato2008.org/en/kids/grow.html
There are so many little excerpts from the book that I want to keep, so I thought I'd post them here, where I can share them with you.
Knowing how foods grow is to know how and when to look for them; such expertise is useful for certain kinds of people, namely, the ones who eat, no matter where they live or grocery shop.
Absence of that knowledge has rendered us a nation of wary label-readers, oddly uneasy in our obligate relationship with the things we eat. We call our food animals by different names after they're dead, presumably sparing ourselves any vision of the beefs and the porks running around on actual hooves. Our words for unhealthy contamination -- "soiled" or "dirty" -- suggest that if we really knew the number-one ingredient of a garden, we'd head straight into therapy. I used to take my children's friends out to the garden to warm them up to the idea of eating vegetables, but this strategy sometimes backfired: they'd back away slowly saying, "Oh man, those things touched dirt!" Adults do the same by pretending it all comes from the clean, well-lighted grocery store. We're like petulant teenagers rejecting our mother. We know we came out of her, but ee-ew.
We don't know beans about beans. Asparagus, potatoes, turkey drumsticks -- you name it, we don't have a clue how the world makes it. I usually think I'm exaggerating the scop of the problem, and then I'll encounter an editor (at a well-known nature magazine) who's nixing the part of my story that refers to pineapples growing from the ground. She insisted they grew on trees. Or, I'll have a conversation like this one:
"What's new on the farm?" asks my friend, a lifelong city dweller who likes for me to keep her posted by phone. She's a gourmet cook, she cares about the world, and has been around a lot longer than I have. This particular conversation was in early spring, so I told her what was up in the garden: peas, potatoes, spinach.
"What a minute," she said. "When you say, 'The potatoes are up,' what do you mean?" She paused, formulating her question: "What part of a potato comes up?"
"Um, the plant part," I said. "The stem and leaves."
"Wow," she said. "I never knew a potato had a plant part." pp. 10-11
FTR, here's a lovely picture montage of how potatoes grow, with the upper parts and the lower parts:
http://www.potato2008.org/en/kids/grow.html