I found
this book by Barbara Kingsolver fascinating. I'm a little late to jump on the trolley here. I remember people talking about this book 3 or 4 years ago. I'm slow, but I get there eventually! Anyway, this book is a kind of journal of Kingsolver and her family's year of trying to eat only locally grown food. Kingsolver is a novelist, poet and science writer with a graduate degree in evolutionary biology, I believe. She writes wonderfully and I found her arguments for why we should eat locally convincing and inspirational. She artfully weaves in lots of factual stuff with warmhearted stories of feasting with family and friends. So I just would like to register my pleasure in reading this book before I start quibbling! I did find myself quibbling with the author as I read. Even so, I highly recommend this book. It definitely gets two thumbs up from me! And you can tell I was inspired by it if you go to this
link at my rinky-dinky, neglected, even though recently started, blog on me and nature!
The first quibble I had was something that was actually addressed in the book, I think by Kingsolvers' husband. (her husband and oldest daughter both contributed asides to the book. Is that what you call them? Asides???). But they kind of too easily swept it aside and I don't think that is a really realistic thing to do. Kingsolver and her family were able to provide most of their food themselves because 1) They live on a farm 2) Kingsolver has been doing serious food gardening since her childhood. She knows how to take land and make it produce lots and lots of delicious food. She's got it covered when it comes to veggies, fruit,even mushrooms (morels just happen to grow wild on her farm!). She is a veteran at this kind of stuff. She really had to alter her life very, very little in order to do this locavore challenge.
The second quibble I have is the way Kingsolver rather picks and chooses what to get kind of righteously indignant about. For instance, they gave up bananas. This is rather a symbol to them for giving up foods that only come from far away. She talks pretty in depth about how we should be able to give up bananas. However, very late in the book she lets it slip that she found it impossible to give up coffee. What! I thought we were talking about global warming here and a horrific catastrophe that we are visiting on our children by our overconsumption of goods that waste petroleum and pollute the earth in order for us to have every food we have a yen for! No? For some reason coffee isn't in the same league with bananas. If you truly think that global warming is a given and write so eloquently and passionately about how we MUST respond, but you can't give up your caffeine in the a.m.???? Major disconnect. Also, how about those banana workers? I think economically it is quite complex an issue. I don't want hurt those workers by denying them income and maybe making them turn to growing cocaine or something instead. (I don't know if cocaine and bananas even grow in the same places! I"m ignorant!).
Another example of this was the fact that Kingsolver used olive oil all the time in her cooking. I really thought she could have scaled back on that. I grew up in a family of Irish desent. We never used olive oil growing up. Instead we used stuff that Kingsolver could have easily gotten locally: bacon fat, chicken fat, lard, butter. But she never even mentions this. She's very into her family's Italian heritage (her husband's) and she obviously reveres Italian food. But come on! She's in the Appalachian mountains of Virginia. When in Rome (where one is surrounded by olive groves) do as the Romans. When in Virginia do as the Appalachians. Isn't this what being a locavore is all about?
Kingsolver does address how you can't be perfect at this locavore thing. And that's true. I understand how she couldn't get seafood locally, where she lives, and how she couldn't find flour locally and had to rely on getting organic stuff from somewhere in the USA. But she had things she could control, like the coffee or the olive oil, but decided it is just too inconvenient, and that seems to me to be just turning a blind eye. Especially, if you are so convinced about the catastrophe of global warming. Now, I'm probably being hypocritical, since I drink coffee and eat bananas. But then again I didn't write a manifesto on why eating local is so vitally important to our world.
The other thing is that during this year, Kingsolver takes a driving vacation from Virginia through New England up into Canada, down through Ohio and then home. Was that not using a lot of fossil fuel there? Then she and her husband go for a two (or maybe more) week driving vacation through Italy (so there's the plane and the car's fuel). This reminded me so much of that Al Gore movie where he's talking about global warming and how we've got to stop polluting and almost the whole movie shows him getting on and off airplanes and in and out of taxis. And this also made me think about how some people, say a city apartment dweller, can't do what Kingsolver did except maybe try to shop at a farmer's market. But they do contribute by taking the subway instead of driving, or buying things from second hand stores or flea markets instead of buying new stuff made in China. If you can't be a foodie locavore, at least you can contribute to the movement in other ways.
I am on the fence about global warming, since I don't know squat. I guess I lean towards thinking it is possible. I think we all should err on the side of caution about it. And I do think that the food industry in our country is unhealthy and unjust in so many ways. I don't like big companies controlling the world's food sources. I believe in farmers! So I do try to buy organic, shop locally, etc. And I want to be greener than I currently am. There's always room for improvement. So really these criticisms are truly just quibbles that sprang to my mind as I read the book.
Another thing though that I found a little alienating in the book was, well. how do I phrase this. . . Kingsolver's religion seems to be food. Thanksgiving is the high holy holiday! The seasons became sort of a liturgical year. And yet I think Kingsolver kind of swipes at traditional religion as she goes along, unless it appeals to her locavore sensibilities, as in her Amish friends, whom she admires very much. For instance she waxes poetically on celebrating the Dias de los Muertos. She talks about how it was started by the Aztecs and how cozy and wonderful it was that their culture didn't fear death and would celebrate in this way. Um, yeah, the Aztecs were so wonderfully cozy about it, they practiced human sacrifice! And then she makes a swipe at Catholicism by saying celebrating Dias de Los Muertos is better than droning on about saints. Huh? Lots and lots of Catholics celebrate both! And droning? I'm a cradle Catholic and I can't remember any droning. And anyway, celebrating the communion of saints is about the the same thing that Kingsolver admires in the Day of the Dead; about how we aren't divided by death! It's about being able to pray to them and ask them for help. It's about wanting to be with loved ones who have passed away some day when it's our turn to pass. Now this was just one line in the book. But these little lines scattered here and there accumulated into something that bothered me. Sometimes she just seemed so darn groovy about taking different holidays and remaking them in her own image to suit her own take on life. Her daughter teaches yoga, wouldn't ya know? Not that I begrudge people trying to find their own path through life, but she just seems such a typical, run of the mill, product of the post-Christian world, hip world.
One part of the book I especially enjoyed was when Kingsolver talks about her foray into breeding a heritage breed of turkeys. She talks about how one type of turkey dominates the market. These turkeys grow big really quickly and get butchered before they can mature enough to mate. So they've actually lost the ability to mate. Every turkey sold in your regular grocery store is a product of artificial insemination. This to me reflects our growing tendency to alienate sex from procreation. We have to step in and use technology to create life. We manipulate the lives of animals to our benefit and now we manipulate human fertility to our own ends. I think the same industrial, convenience-minded, amoral behavior that led to the very problems locavores are fighting against are reflected in modern society's attitude towards sex. All the artificial birth control/ divorcing sex from procreation until a woman gets chlamydia or whatever and at age 35 she's infertile, finally ready to settle down and decides to go in vitro so she can have a baby. The whole thing is just wrong! So invasive and artificial and so disrespectful of the gift of life.
All right I got all that off my chest. But all the above quibbles aside, I truly enjoyed this book and was very inspired by it.
For more book reviews see
52 Books in 52 Weeks.
