…I’m beginning at least to notice when I’m consuming the United Nations of edible plants and animals all in one seating. (Or the WTO, is more like it.) On a winter’s day not long ago I was served a sumptuous meal like this, finished off with a dessert of rasberries. Because they only grow in temperate zones, not the tropics, these would have come from somewhere deep in the Southern Hemisphere. I was amazed that such small, eminently bruisable fruits could survive a zillion-mile trip looking so good (I myself look pretty wrecked after a mere red-eye from California), and I mumbled some reserved awe over that fact. I think my hostess was amused by my country-mouse naivete. “This is New York,” she assured me. “We can get anything we want, any day of the year.”
The business of importing foods across great distances is not, by its nature, a boon to Third World farmers, but it’s very good business for oil companies. Transporting a single calorie of a perishable fresh fruit from California to New York takes about 87 calories worth of fuel. That’s as efficient as driving from Philadelphia to Annapolis, and back, in order to walk three miles on a treadmill in a Maryland gym. There may be people who’d do it. Pardon me while I ask someone else to redraft my energy budget.
If you are willing to read just one book this year, this one deserves consideration. And even if you’re not, it’s still worth it. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by novelist Barbara Kingsolver (of The Poisonwood Bible fame), has documented a year of her family living solely off food they have grown themselves, or has been grown in their local area.
I cannot begin to describe just how much this book teaches you. As well as being beautifully written, and the stories about Kingsolver’s family being enchanting themselves, it teaches you about the economics of food production, (did you know the USA exports 1.1 million tonnes of potatoes, while importing 1.4 million tonnes from elsewhere?), the politics of soy and corn farming, the way we have lost a food culture and our knowledge of the origins of our food has plummeted, along with our reliance on food species from being in the thousands to just a handful. It then goes on to show you how to reverse it, how to take pride and joy in a plethora of seasonal foods, each enjoyed at their right time of the year for your local environment.
The point of the book is to educate. To encourage people to redevelop a food culture. To reconnect with what our environments produce – to be in sync with the seasons, instead of relying on tasteless vegetables express freighted from half a world away. To re-invest in local economies rather than multinational conglomerates and freight companies, and bring joy, delight and indulgence back to the dinner table, where to wait for a food to be in season – to desist from simply eating the all-year supply of supermarkets – is actually to indulge and enjoy a food so much more.
Written in conjunction with her husband (an environmental scientist) and daughter (a nutrition student), the book gives you heart-warming stories, inspiring advice, recipes, and facts on the global politics of food and freight. If the peak-oil theories are anywhere near correct, the changes that this book explore are some of the ones that will have to be made. And people are already doing it. I’ve been going to farmers markets recently, in an effort to buy and eat local and organic produce. And they’re packed.
This is, above-all, a useful book. I discovered in myself an embarrassing lack of knowledge of when I might expect to find various fruits and vegetables in season. It teaches you this. Then it gives you recipes to try them in. It puts a joy and a inspiration into eating and cooking – and even shopping for food – that makes it less of a chore, less bland. Are you sick of eating the same 5 meals all the time? Then take the time to read this book and it will teach you how to delight in the food you prepare, and to experience food that is richer and better for you, and for the world in which we live.
Filed under: books, environment, food culture, recipes
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