Ethical Eating with Barbara Kingsolver

Local Food from a Known Source

At some point in the next few months, I am going to be buried in research and writing about Ethical Eating.  That is the topic of an issue of a journal that I am re-editing for re-publication (it's a long story).  Maximizing the utility of that effort, I have committed to using this issue of the journal--and the issue of Ethical Eating--as the topic for a presentation at the Ethical Society of Austin in the spring.

In the course of re-editing a different volume of the journal, I encountered a reference to Barbara Kingsolver and her novel, Flight Behavior.  A comment she made about that book was quoted in the essay that I was correcting (typos, punctuation, red--or blue--pencil heaven for a former English instructor).  There was, however, no citation for the quote, and I really wanted to add the proper footnote for this reference.  I googled it--and the only hit was the online version of the very article I was editing.  Spftt!  I was apparently searching for a misquote.

TL;DR, I dinked around on the internet to try to figure out some way to find the comment without spending days on it and ended up at Archive.org, thinking I would scope out the novel and, by some miracle, find the quote.  Instead I all but tripped over Animal, Vegetable, Miracle:  A Year of Food Life, by Kingsolver, et al.  I have no idea why I would even give the book a second glance, much less start reading it, but suddenly I was two chapters in and realized that (a) I have completely missed an entertaining author and (b) this is the other half of what I know I will be talking about when I give the presentation on Ethical Eating.

Kingsolver's autobiographical book is about a decision that she and her family made to change the way they eat.  A major part of that decision was environmental.  She lived in Tucson, a desert area in the midst of a drought, where food and water had to be brought in from other areas.  She was concerned that our society--and her family--didn't know where the food we ate came from, how it was grown, or what it could be (tasty, nutritious) when at its freshest.  She--and her family--made the decision to move from Tucson to a farm in the Appalachians that her husband owned so that they could change that situation for themselves.  

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is a book about a year in food during which the whole family had pledged to eat only locally sourced food.  That sounds simple enough until you take in account that this planet has seasons.  Everything, all at once, all the time is not how food  appears on our plates or even in our local grocery stores.  Part of Kingsolver's thesis is that we have lost our connection to the planet and the sustenance that we take from it.  The other part is that we are destroying the planet by taking too much from it and misusing what we take.  No doubt I oversimplify.  

No doubt either that these points sound negative while Kingsolver's book is positive and proactive and a delight to read.  The family's negotiations about one non-local luxury/essential made complete sense, as 21st century urbanized omnivores were suddenly faced with the loss of foods and beverages long taken for granted.  Kingsolver's husband chose coffee as his personal exception to the rule of consuming local products, and who could blame him?  (Not I, limited these days to one cup in the morning and sorely aggrieved about the whole thing.)  Kingsolver's long history of trying to grow asparagus was neither boring nor tedious.  Her tale was, in fact, heroic--and now I wonder what fibrous green thing I've been eating all these years.  Each chapter brings new insights into how American foodways have changed, what we are missing because of those changes, and what we might do differently.

The book is a delight to read; Kingsolver's style is light and a bit wry.  The message is more than timely:  We need to take as much petroleum as we possibly can out of our food supply.  The whole-family orientation of the book (Kingsolver's husband provides multiple "sidebars" filled with pertinent information; Kingsolver's oldest daughter provides personal narratives of her "adventures with food") and the shared commitment to locally sourced food are inspirational.  

Plus this.  Needless to say, I recommend the book as well as some of the strategies that Kingsolver and her family adopted in order to take petroleum out of their food.  I'm no gardener; I have a seriously bad history with plants.  However, with Kingsolver's encouragement, my grandson and I went to the local Farmer's Market to purchase free range eggs and in season vegetables.  We also found fair trade coffee, albeit sourced from both hemispheres.  It's a start.