Dig It

I read books about small-scale farming because it reminds me of why I do the job that I do. Farming can be demanding and difficult, but also satisfying in a way that other jobs aren’t. Perhaps it is the office (or lack thereof), perhaps it is the harvest, perhaps it is the fact that positive work means a positive mood. For me, being a farmer is being an activist, and making a difference can make you happy. The result of this summer’s work was, I hope, not just a heck of a lot of tomatoes, but the shared belief that supporting small, sustainable farmers is a good choice to be made. It is this choice that Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is all about.

The book is the tale of one family’s decision to spend a year eating food grown locally, whether it’s found in their garden, on their land or at their neighborhood farmers market. This decision, while made easier by the family’s move from the deserts of the Southwest to the lusher lands of Appalachia, wasn’t an easy one; there were cravings to resist and allowances to be made and some hard winter months to get through on a somewhat limited diet. What do you do when you realize that strawberries don’t grow in December? That coffee doesn’t grow on your continent? That bananas are all together out of the question?

But Kingsolver, her husband, and her two daughters press on, pushed forward by our poor understanding of just where our food comes from (or, as Kingsolver calls it, our lack of a “food culture”). She writes:

When we walked away as a nation from the land, our knowledge of food fell away from us like dirt in a laundry-soap commercial. Now, it’s fair to say, the majority of us don’t want to be farmers, see farmers, pay farmers, or hear their complaints. Except as straw-chewing figures in children’s books, we don’t quite believe in them anymore.

Learning just who these straw-chewing men and women are becomes part and parcel of Kingsolver’s new food system. She and her family meet “those actual humans putting seeds in the ground, harvesting, attending livestock births, standing in the fields at dawn casting their shadows upon our sustenance.” And all involved, including the land on which they live, benefit from this interaction. Kingsolver writes of a trust in their food that neither she nor her family had found before:

Local food is a handshake deal in a community gathering place. It involves farmers with first names, who show up week after week. It means an open-door policy on the fields, where neighborhood buyers are welcome to come have a look, and pick their food from the vine. Local is farmers growing trust.

Imagine it. Trust in a tomato, in a pepper, in an eggplant. It is what drives me to dig it, it is what makes this food taste so good, and it is what makes this sort of farming so much fun.