Animal Vegetable Miracle

I LOVE Barbara Kingsolver. When Della introduced me to her I immediately read everything she ever wrote (sadly, not nearly as many books as I had hoped). Well, now she has a new one that J gave me for Christmas. I just started reading it 5 minutes ago and I am only to page 11, but it is FANTASTIC. So I thought I would post right away so that you would all go read it immediately and wouldn't have to suffer through one more minute of not reading this book. But you are going to have to go get your own copy, because there is no way you are going to be able to pry it out of my hands. Jeremy has already been circling suspiciously. I guess there is a possibility that once I read more than 10 pages that my ardor will cool, but I doubt it. I will let you know. Anyway, here is a tasty tidbit for you:

(Upon moving from Tuscon, AZ to Virginia--thoughts on agriculture in the US)
"We also have convinced ourselves it (farming) wasn't too important. Consider how Americans might respond to a proposal that agriculture was to become a mandatory subject in all schools, alongside reading and mathematics. A fair number of parents would get hot under the collar to see their kids' attention being pulled away from the essentials of grammar, the all-important trigonometry, to make room for down-on-th-farm stuff. The baby boom psyche embraces a powerful presumption that education is key to moving away from manual labor, and dirt--two undeniable ingredients of farming. It's good enough for us that somebody, somewhere, knows food production well enough to serve the rest of us with all we need to eat, each day of our lives.

If that is true, why isn't it good enough for someone else to know multiplication and the contents of the Bill of Rights? Is the story of bread, from tilled ground to our table, less relevant to our lives than the history of the 13 colonies? Couldn't one make a case for the relevance of a subject that informs choices we make daily--as in, What's for dinner? Isn't ignorance of our food sources causing problems as diverse as overdependence on petroleum, and an epidemic of diet-related diseases?

If this book is not exactly an argument for reinstating food-production classes in schools (and it might be), it does contain a lot of what you might learn there. From our family's gas-station beginnings we have traveled far enough to discover ways of taking charge of one's food, and even knowing where it has been. This is the story of a year in which we made every attempt to feed ourselves animals and vegetables whose provenance we really knew. We tried to wring most of the petroleum out of our food chain, even if that meant giving up some things. Our highest shopping goal was to get our food from so close to home, we'd know the person who grew it. Often that turned out to be us, as we learned to produce more of what we needed, starting with dirt, seeds, and enough knowledge to muddle through. Or starting with baby animals and enough sense to refrain from naming them.

(skipping forward a little)

Absence of that knowledge (farming) 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 all head straight into therapy. I used to take my children's friends out to the garden to warm them up to the idea o 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."