Seeds and Self-Sufficiency
I have recently been wondering whether or not Agribusiness is either trying to kill us, or is trying to transform all of us into passive cattle, much like the poor creatures whose meat we have learned to crave and obediently consume. These misgivings were prompted by information I encountered in the excellent non-fiction book by Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, subtitled, A Year of Food Life. Allow me to thump her tub by providing a brief description of her provocative book. One moment… Oh, yes; it is about the determination of a family to eat only foods grown by local farmers or foods they've grown for themselves. I urge you to purchase, borrow, or check out from a library this timely and important book. Before synopsizing some of Barbara Kingsolver's key revelations, I would first like to tell you a little something about how things used to be; in particular, how things used to be for me growing up in middle America. This seeming digression should amount to a proper introduction for a discussion of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. I grew up eating in the way recommended by Kingsolver, and, look at me; I am a hardy and cantankerous old rascal with the expectation of living beyond the one hundred-plus years achieved by my male relatives.
Before visiting the scene of my childhood during the late nineteen thirties (the latter part of the Great Depression) and the early forties (the era of World War II), let me first tell you about the most delectable melon I ever tasted. This cherished experience occurred in the nineteen sixties, during a camping trip into Canada with my wife and two children. While driving through the countryside of rural Ontario, we came upon a truck farmer who was selling his produce at roadside. We bought some of his vegetables that we intended to later boil or steam over our campfire, and we also bought several of his cantaloupes (Cucumis melo reticulates). These were considerably smaller than the melons one now finds in grocery stores, and were slightly larger than softballs. We quartered one melon and revealed the deep orange color of the interior flesh of the fruit. We then ate it warm, and enjoyed a succulent melon flavor that, decades later, still lingers on my taste buds. (Or is that sense memory imprinted somewhere in a part of my brain that somehow retains the illusion of taste sensations? Obviously, I am deficient in having a grasp of the neurological disciplines.) The farmer claimed that no pesticides or industrial fertilizers were used in growing his fruits and vegetables. Decide for yourself whether what we now describe as organic farming contributed to the incredible taste of his produce. I can tell you this—that the huge cantaloupes one finds in today's supermarkets have little more flavor, I suspect, than the boxes in which they were shipped. The point is that I have found that the flavor of large fruits and vegetables (and meat) to be far inferior to the smaller varieties. (I am not at all in awe of, and do not fear, the chemically enhanced, giant turkeys with feet that can't support their extraordinary dimensions; they are quite easy to tip over.) The most tender, tastiest meat I have ever experienced was from a quail (apologies to PETA), and the tastiest, tartest strawberries for me were the small, wild berries picked alongside an old railroad track outside of town, and baked in a luscious pie by my mother.
Seeds and Self-Sufficiency
This serves to remind me that, when I was growing up, all of our food came from local sources. I lived in a small town that was (and still is) located on the banks of the Wabash. After my father enlisted in the Navy, my mother and her three semi-obedient sons moved in with the grandparents. Grandfather's property in town encompassed about one half of an acre of rich, black soil, and one entire rear section of the property was given over to a garden, a garden that never depended on industrial fertilizers. He planted and harvested tomatoes, corn, lettuce, cabbage, beets, onions, carrots, potatoes, radishes, and rhubarb. There were various fruit tress around the yard—red and yellow cherry trees, a persimmon tree, mulberry trees, pear trees, a crabapple tree, and greengage plum trees (Prunus domestica). We also had a grape arbor and several sugar maple trees. Grandmother and mother made jelly from the grapes and plums, and grandfather tapped the maple trees for syrup. I mustn't forget the chicken coop on the side of the yard adjacent to the garden. (My grandmother was the expert decapitator of chickens, so that her little grandsons were regularly horrified by the sight of headless chickens lurching about in the backyard.) Much of our other meat was locally grown and sold in the town's butcher shop, or came from fishing in the river or hunting seasonal game. Fruits and vegetables were canned for winter use, and the butter lady, the wife of a local farmer, once a week delivered butter, cream, milk, and cottage cheese to our door. The only other goods that the family definitely had to purchase were flour, salt, pepper, and sugar. I have fond memories of wandering through our yard, plucking from a vine or tree or from the earth a fresh, ripe tomato, yellow cherries, or carrots, and eating them raw, occasionally having to dust off black dirt on my trouser leg. The point of this withering explosion of nostalgia, and the point of Kingsolver's book, is that we would all be far better off if we were to consume, as much as possible, local produce.
According to Kingsolver, about seventeen percent of our country's energy usage is devoted to agriculture—for fueling tractors, combines, irrigation devices, and other farm equipment. Oil is also the basic resource for the production of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, and accounts for some twenty percent of the energy used on farms. However, the oil consumed on farms for food production amounts to only a fraction of the total energy used by agribusiness. Every single item we eat has on the average traveled some fifteen hundred miles to reach our plates.
During the brief history of our young country's existence, we have moved from being a rural nation to being an urban nation, and most of us have lost our connection with the land, with the natural flow of the seasons, and with the growing cycles of plants. Most people cannot tell you how asparagus is grown, when the first frost will likely occur, the best time and manner for planting tomatoes or anything else, what animals and plants thrive in their region, or where the food for dinner was actually grown.
The huge agribusiness consortiums appear to be dedicated to the elimination of diversity in food products, quite understandable for organizations primarily concerned with maintaining extraordinary profit margins. You see, if a company only has to bother with the production of one type of hybrid seed or one genetically cultivated monster turkey, there is no point or profit in producing the (disappearing) heritage crops and species.
I hope that this brief description of Kingsolver's book has sufficiently motivated you to locate a copy for yourself. The book isn't at all an unending tract of bad news. Most of it is a charming account of how one family is living a self-sufficient life on a small farm, producing much of the food they consume, or buying it from local farmers. Their adventures in developing this enviable way of living are related in a prose style that is artfully wrought, its approach extremely warm-hearted and engaging.