I told you. I pushed the wrong button and it published. Anyway here is todays blog, I plan on one a day. Cross finger please
Book Review, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver.
By Sherita Saffer Campbell
Barbara Kingsolver’s newest book Animal, Vegetable Miracle is non-fiction, well researched and an answer to Al Gore’s book by giving us many ideas that each individual can easily do right away. It’s what Muncie, IN author Alan Garinger taught and wrote about in his monthly newsletter, North Forty.
Buy local. This is the most important concept from this book.
Sound easy?
It was back in the day. It’s not anymore.
When my husband and I were first married, 1958, we grew up this way to a certain extent and continued it in our marriage. It was easy. We always had a garden, a freezer or canned food. Just about everyone did. There was even a personal canning factory in our town if you didn’t have time to can what you grew or bought from local farmers.
We had local bread stores, neighborhood grocery stores, drug stores. There were at least three dairies, two local vegetable and fruit markets. In our towns collective wisdom we let these things close so we could buy from non-local chain stores. Bright lights of super stores blinded us.
Kingsolver lived and wrote in Arizona almost her whole adult life, her first marriage, her divorce and her early writing career were here. She raised her children here. She worked on her writing, from her first big book success, The Bean Fields, to her recent well known books. The Poisonwood Bible is one of my favorites. Several novels in between that topped the sales.
Animal, Vegetable Miracle, discusses what it costs in fuel to import food from other countries, and even our own country to our corner grocery. Bananas cost the most in energy use. Those little delights cost the most in gas, and oil. Her children contribute recipes, chapters and advice.
The quality of the food being shipped from other countries and coast to coast might not be as fresh or good as what we can grow ourselves or buy from local Farmer’s Markets.
When she and her husband married, they both lived in Arizona and summered on the farm in West Virginia. Slowly they began to want to live on the farm and grow their own food. They studied, read and became involved in the Slow Cooking community. Gas prices began to rise, eating and buying local became the most efficient thing to do. The eating local movement was born.. The Slow Food movement began in California with I think a great deal of borrowing from French country cooking. A few chefs bought local fresh produce and began to cook meals for friends. The "local" friends grew to groups. Then restaurants and groups spread across the country. Most of this happened by word of mouth, cook books and recipe exchanges. This led to people planting their own gardens to have fresh organic food to cook. Then, to buying fresh food at the local Farmers Markets, growing your own, buying from farmers and “putting up” food to use all year long. Which, because of high fuel prices, jump started local buying and the green movement.
Kingsolver’s husband is a----- together they are incredible researchers with attention to every detail. They decided and planned how to plant, when to plant, what to plant to include animals, chickens, turkeys and finally lambs in their plan. They even found local wineries and mills to grind wheat and other grain crops. Calling it harvesting what they grew, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.
The rules were they had to use what they planted or animals they raised on the farm, (leaving out pets). The entire family had to participate. They decided for one year nothing would come into their kitchen to eat but what they grew, or bought local. If they couldn’t buy it local, they would find a local substitute in equal food value and taste.
This was a formidable task.
She and her husband and family did their research well.
The chapter on turkey sex is worth the price of the book. Did you know that the animals that we buy frozen from C.A.F.O.’s, have had the inclination to promote the species bred out of them? This includes even the turkeys that are sold live for folks to raise for Thanksgiving or any other purpose unless they are heritage Turkeys of which there are few farms.
If you should purchase a live hen and tom turkey to try to raise turkeys to raise you might have a problem. You have to teach them to figure how to procreate when you get them home down on the farm. Should the turkeys figure how this procedure of sexual attraction and beyond. You still have a problem. Mamma hen does not have a clue about what to with the eggs she lays. Nor do the little gobblers know should they get a hormone surge what it means and how or on whom to imprint. What they see most is whom they get a crush. In this case Kingsolver’s spouse.
Did you know the line of heritage turkeys has declined, as heritage seeds have? However lately Farmers Markets and the various slow cooking movements have sent people to find these heritage crops. Heritage tomatoes that I, and others search for in farmer's markets have become big attractions..
But a small group of seed savers have saved and exchanged seeds until now it is easier to obtain heritage seeds for planting. I think several seed catalogs have sections on Heritage Seeds. There are also Heritage Seed Catalogs, I am told. The same is true for Heritage turkeys. This year PBS had a short special on farms and farmers that sill raised Heritage Turkeys though their number has declined, but might begin to thrive again.
Bless those wonderful heritage seed collectors that I read about in Mother Earth news and various other “little” catalogs. Bless those people who saved seeds like my dad, uncles and grandparents did until the day they went to that seed place in the sky.
To read her book is to see how we have been hoodwinked to believe that the supermarket is our answer to all things. Yes, some supermarkets have begun to sell local. That’s only half the issue. Oil, energy is the other.
The cost of transporting all that food to our local store ups the price and uses too much energy. Whether it is organic or not. If it comes from far, far away it costs oil to get here. A great deal of oil. If we ever want to begin in every way not to be addicted to oil. We must begin at the local level. Getting rid of any addiction is difficult.
My 12 Step program is as follows.
1. Plant a garden if possible.
2. Find your local farmer's market. Purchase food there.
3. Learn to freeze or can the above produce.
4. Find the local farmers who sell from their land.
5. Find local Farm Stand stores that sell organic or local food all year long. (We just have one now that sells organic vegetables, fresh, canned and frozen. And buffalo meat, pig, chicken and sometimes beef that is free range. Very important because I refuse to eat any meat grown on a factory farm. If that animal can’t eat grass and see the sun before he or she dies, no way will I eat it.
6. Find a support group that is working to control or maybe, eliminate C.A.F.O.s.
7. Write congress, local and federal to eliminate these farms or have stricter controls.
8. Find out where you food, meat and vegetables are coming from.
9. Start a slow cooking group with friends.
10. Read where the feces from the factory animal farms go and what it does to the soil.
11. Read what hormones and food is given to the animals on this farms and what they do your body when you consume it. And what it does to the soil in those little ponds that catch the excrement of animals.
12. Learn how good fresh local organic food can taste.
Nope, it is not easy Mcgee.. I can’t always do it. I get in a hurry, stop at a fast food place to gobble. Run to the store and buy something I thinks I need. But I am working on it.
I am trying to become more vegetarian because I can’t figure out where stores get their meat unless I shop at our local Farmstand. We have a farm in out country that raises buffalo. My husband hunts deer. I’ve not found a local heritage farm for turkeys. I used to raise chickens and right now my health does not permit that. I found a local farm where I can get free range eggs. I can’t afford an organic chicken.
I consider local my trips to Indianapolis to Traders Joe’s, when I am in Carmel for my Sisters In Crime meetings once a month. That really adds to my organic food. My children and thier friends are planting a sort of community family garden for us this year. We plan to expand and when I am in better health I will help with that more. We will freeze, can and trade. Getting healthy fish is harder. The lakes we used to fish are not as healthy as they could be. e coli, and run off from the factory farms, plus people landscaping their yards. The same bad chemicals are used to keep lawns weed free as are used into non-organic farming. So that’s another issue.
Read this wondrous book, if you don’t want to plant a garden freeze produce. Consider buying from local farmers, farmer’s markets and canning and freezing what you can.
I live in the county and in a state that from May on everyone I know asks how the tomato plants are growing and everyone puts in some kind of garden even if it is just two tomato plants. They are glorious two plants believe me. Because not do this is a mortal sin and grandma and grandpa will send down lighting bolts.
My parents came through the depression, we never moved into a house until the field, or the back yard, was approved to “make garden.”
The year my grandmother did not plant a garden I knew she was going to the nursing home. She was in her late 80’s and she did. In Indiana it stays in your blood, The garden, jobs may fail, money taken for taxes and other evils, but if you have a garden, you will always have a meal.
Read the book and think about our dependence on the global market and our own self sufficiency that we have lost with Ipods, computers and federal and state legislators deciding someone’s fate beside ours.
Yes, I have a computer and I love it. I have a cell phone, and I have a MT3 that I’m listening as I write. My daughter gave me the MT3. I am addicted to it. Don't tell me what batteries do to the environment. Not yet. I won't be ready for it. Let me win this phase of my life first. And I love it I’m afraid to say. I’m 70 years old, this June, and I watch TV, listen to PBS.
I’m working on greening up, using what I learned from my parents and grandparents and trying to adjust it to today. Wherever I can I am buying local. I’m working on saving as much gas as I can. Finding different means to get into the city and go on adventures that are more energy consciousness. This, I hope, will make up for half a lifetime of fuel sinning.
It is also a political issue because it takes the control of my life and country away from me and gives that control to the big corporations that are taking every aspect of our lives. Because I am a Quaker it becomes a peace issue. Because that is what I believe the last two wars were and are being fought. In a sense I guess it is having the old Victory gardens that were begun in WW 2. I have to have more control over my life, how I choose to live it. How I evolve into a better person is important to me. How I shall leave this land and country for the next seven generations as my native American ancestors in my fathers believed. That is my idea of freedom. Not war, but conservation and preservation of this land we all love.
Labels: Spring, the world and US economy
