Small Wonder (13 page)

I am trying to learn about this complicated web as I go, and I'm in no position to judge anyone else's personal habits, believe me. My life is riddled with energy inconsistencies: We try hard to conserve, but I've found no way as yet to rear and support my family without a car, a computer, the occasional airplane flight, a teenager's bathroom equipped with a hair dryer, et cetera. I'm no Henry D. Thoreau. (And just for the record, for all his glorification of his
bean patch, Henry is known habitually to have gone next door to eat Mrs. Ralph W. Emerson's cooking.) Occasional infusions of root beer are apparently necessary to my family's continued life, along with a brand of vegetable chips made in Uniondale, New York. And there's no use in my trying to fib about it, either, for it's always when I have just these items in the grocery cart, and my hair up in the wackiest of slapdash ponytails, that some kind person in the checkout line will declare, “Oh, Ms. Kingsolver, I just love your work!”

Our quest is only to be thoughtful and simplify our needs, step by step. In the way of imported goods, I try to stick to nonperishables that are less fuel-costly to ship; rice, flour, and coffee are good examples. Just as simply as I could buy coffee and spices from the grocery, I can order them through a collective in Fort Wayne, Indiana, that gives my money directly to cooperative farmers in Africa and Central America who are growing these crops without damaging their tropical habitat. We struggled with the notion of giving up coffee altogether until we learned from ornithologist friends who study migratory birds being lost to habitat destruction, that there is a coffee-cultivation practice that helps rather than hurts. Any coffee labeled “shade grown”—now available in most North American markets—was grown under rain-forest canopy on a farm that is holding a piece of jungle intact, providing subsistence for its human inhabitants and its birds.

I understand the power implicit in these choices. That I have such choices at all is a phenomenal privilege in a world where so many go hungry, even as our nation uses food as a political weapon, embargoing grain shipments to places such as Nicaragua and Iraq. I find both security and humility in feeding myself as best I can, and learning to live within the constraints of my climate and seasons. I like the challenge of organizing our meals as my grandmothers did, starting with the question of season and which cup is at the moment running over. I love to trade recipes with my
gardening friends, and join in their cheerful competition to see who can come up with the most ways to conceal the i.d. of a zucchini squash.

If we are blessed with an abundance of choices about food, we are surely also obliged to consider the responsibility implicit in our choices. There has never been a more important time to think about where our food comes from. We could make for ourselves a safer nation, overnight, simply by giving more support to our local food economies and learning ways of eating and living around a table that reflects the calendar. Our families, of course, will never need to be as beholden to the seasons as the Native Americans who called February by the name “Hungry Month,” and I'm grateful for that. But we can try to live close enough to the land's ordinary time that we notice when something is out of place and special. My grandfather Kingsolver used to tell me with a light in his eyes about the boxcar that came through Kentucky on the L&N line when he was a boy—only once a year, at Christmas—carrying oysters and oranges from the coast. Throughout my own childhood, every year at Christmastime while an endless burden of wants burgeoned around everybody else, my grandfather wanted only two things: a bowl of oyster soup and an orange. The depth of his pleasure in that meal was so tangible, even to a child, that my memory of it fills me with wonder at how deeply fulfillment can blossom from a cultivated ground of restraint.

I remember this as I struggle—along with most parents I know—to make clear distinctions between love and indulgence in raising my children. I honestly believe that material glut can rob a child of certain kinds of satisfaction—though deprivation is no picnic, either. And so our family indulges in exotic treats on big occasions. A box of Portuguese clementines one Christmas is still on Lily's catalog of favorite memories, and a wild turkey we got from Canada one Thanksgiving remains on my own. We enjoy these kinds of things spectacularly because at our house they're rare.

And yes, we eat some animals, in careful deference to the reasons for avoiding doing so. I don't really feel, as some have told me, that it's a sin to eat anything with a face, nor do I believe it's possible to live by that rule unless one maintains a certain degree of purposeful ignorance. Butterflies and bees and locusts all have faces, and they die like lambs to the slaughter (and in greater numbers) whenever a field of vegetable food is sprayed or harvested. Faceless? Not the birds that eat the poisoned insects, the bunnies sliced beneath the plow, the foxes displaced from the forest-turned-to-organic-wheat-field, and so on. If the argument is that meat comes from
higher orders
of life than those creatures, I wonder how the artificial, glassy-eyed construct of a bovine life gets to weigh more than the wiles of a fox or the virtuosity of a songbird. Myself, I love wild lives at least as much as tame ones, and eating costs lives. Even organic farmers kill crop predators in ways that aren't pretty, so a vegetable diet doesn't provide quite the sparkling karma one might wish. Most soybeans grown in this country are genetically engineered in ways that are anathema to biodiversity. So drinking soy milk, however wholesome it may be, doesn't save animals.

No, it's the other savings that compel me most toward a vegetable-based diet—the ones revealed by simple math. A pound of cow or hog flesh costs about ten pounds of plant matter to produce. So a field of grain that would feed a hundred people, when fed instead to cows or pigs that are
then
fed to people, fills the bellies of only ten of them; the other ninety, I guess, will just have to go hungry. That, in a nutshell, is how it's presently shaking down with the world, the world's arable land, and the world's hamburger eaters.

Some years ago our family took a trip across the Midwest to visit relatives in Iowa, and for thousands of miles along the way we saw virtually no animal life except feedlots full of cattle—surely the most unappetizing sight and smell I've encountered in my life
(and my life includes some years of intimacy with diaper pails). And we saw almost no plant life but the endless fields of corn and soybeans required to feed those pathetic penned beasts. Our kids kept asking, mile after mile, “What used to be here?” It led to long discussions of America's vanished prairie, Mexico's vanished forests, and the diversity of species in the South American rain forests that are now being extinguished to make way for more cattle graze. We also talked about a vanishing American culture: During the last half century or so, each passing year has seen about half a million more people move away from farms (including all of my children's grandparents or great-grandparents). The lively web of farmhouses, schoolhouses, pasture lands, woodlots, livestock barns, poultry coops, and tilled fields that once constituted America's breadbasket has been replaced with a meat-fattening monoculture. When we got home our daughter announced firmly, “I'm never going to eat a cow again.”

When your ten-year-old calls your conscience to order, you show up: She
hasn't
eaten a cow since, and neither have we. It's an industry I no longer want to get tangled up in, even at the level of the ninety-nine-cent exchange. Each and every quarter pound of hamburger is handed across the counter after the following productions costs, which I've searched out precisely: 100 gallons of water, 1.2 pounds of grain, a cup of gasoline, greenhouse-gas emissions equivalent to those produced by a six-mile drive in your average car, and the loss of 1.25 pounds of topsoil, every inch of which took five hundred years for the microbes and earthworms to build. How can all this cost less than a dollar, and who is supposed to pay for the rest of it? If I were a cow, right here is where I'd go mad.

Thus our family parted ways with all animal flesh wrought from feedlots. But for some farmers on certain land, assuming that they don't have the option of turning their acreage into a national park (and that people will keep wanting to eat), the most ecologi
cally sound use of it is to let free-range animals turn its grass and weeds into edible flesh, rather than turning it every year under the plow. We also have neighbors who raise organic beef for their family on hardly more than the byproducts of other things they grow. It's quite possible to raise animals sustainably, and we support the grass-based farmers around us by purchasing their chickens and eggs.

Or we did, that is, until Lily got her chickens. The next time a roasted bird showed up on our table she grew wide-eyed, set down her fork, and asked, “Mama…is that…Mr. Doodle?”

I reassured her a dozen times that I would
never
cook Mr. Doodle; this was just some chicken
we didn't know
. But a lesson had come home to, well, roost. All of us sooner or later must learn to look our food in the face. If we're willing to eat an animal, it's probably only responsible to accept the truth of its living provenance rather than pretending it's a “product” from a frozen-foods shelf with its gizzard in a paper envelope. I've been straight with my kids ever since the first one leveled me with her eye and said, “Mom, no offense, but I think
you're
the Tooth Fairy.” So at dinner that night we talked about the biology, ethics, and occasional heartbreaks of eating food. I told Lily that when I was a girl growing up among creatures I would someday have to eat, my mother had promised we would never butcher anything that had a first name. Thereafter I was always told from the outset which animals I could name. I offered Lily the same deal.

So she made her peace with the consumption of her beloveds' nameless relatives. We still weren't sure, though, how we'd fare when it came to eating their direct descendants. We'd allowed that next spring she might let a hen incubate and hatch out a few new chicks (Lily quickly decided on the precise number she wanted and, significantly, their names), but we stressed that we weren't in this business to raise ten thousand pets. Understood, said Lily. So we waited a week, then two, while Jess, Bess, and company
worked through their putative emotional trauma and settled in to laying. We wondered, How will it go? When our darling five-year-old pantheist, who believes that even stuffed animals have souls, goes out there with the egg basket one day and comes back with eggs, how will we explain to her that she can't name those babes, because we're going to scramble them?

Here is how it went: She returned triumphantly that morning with one unbelievably small brown egg in her basket, planted her feet on the kitchen tile, and shouted at the top of her lungs, “Attention, everybody, I have an announcement: FREE BREAKFAST.”

We agreed that the first one was hers. I cooked it to her very exact specifications, and she ate it with gusto. We admired the deep red-orange color of the yolk, from the beta-carotenes in those tasty green weeds. Lily could hardly wait for the day when all of us would sit down to a free breakfast, courtesy of her friends. I wish that every child could feel so proud, and every family could share the grace of our table.

 

I think a lot about those thirty citizens of India who, it's said, could live on the average American's stuff. I wonder if I could build a life of contentment on their material lot, and then I look around my house and wonder what they'd make of mine. My closet would clothe more than half of them, and my books—good Lord—could open a library branch in New Delhi. Our family's musical instruments would outfit an entire (if very weird) village band, featuring electric guitars, violin, eclectic percussion section, and a really dusty clarinet. We have more stuff than we need; there is no question of our being perfect. I'm not even sure what “perfect” means in this discussion. I'm not trying to persuade my family to evaporate and live on air. We're here, we're alive, it's the only
one we get, as far as I know, so I am keenly inclined to take hold of life by its
huevos
. As a dinner guest I gratefully eat just about anything that's set before me, because graciousness among friends is dearer to me than any other agenda. I'm not up for a guilt trip, just an adventure in bearable lightness. I approach our efforts at simplicity as a novice approaches her order, aspiring to a lifetime of deepening understanding, discipline, serenity, and joy. Likening voluntary simplicity to a religion is neither hyperbole nor sacrilege. Some people look around and declare the root of all evil to be sex or blasphemy, and so they aspire to be pious and chaste. Where I look for evil I'm more likely to see degradations of human and natural life, an immoral gap between rich and poor, a ravaged earth. At the root of these I see greed and overconsumption by the powerful minority. I was born to that caste, but I can aspire to waste not and want less.

I'm skeptical of evangelism, so I'm not going to have a tent revival here. But if you've come with me this far, you are in some sense a fellow traveler, and I'm glad for your company. In this congregation we don't confess or sit around chanting “we are not worthy”; we just do what we can and trust that the effort matters. Of all the ways we consume, food is a sensible one to attend to. Eating is a genuine need, continuous from our first day to our last, amounting over time to our most significant statement of what we are made of and what we have chosen to make of our connection to home ground. We can hardly choose
not
to eat, but we have to choose
how
, and our choices can have astounding consequences. Consider this: The average food item set before a U.S. consumer traveled 1,300 miles to get there. If Mr. Average eats ten or so items a day (and most of us eat more), in a year's time his food will have conquered five million miles by land, sea, and air. Picture a truck loaded with apples and oranges and iceberg lettuce rumbling to the moon and back ten times a year, all just for you. Multiply that by the number of Americans who like to eat—picture
that flotilla of 285 million trucks on their way to the moon—and tell me you don't think it's time to revise this scenario.