Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

“If every U.S. citizen ate just one meal a week (any meal) composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce, we would reduce our country’s oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels of oil every week.” 

One of the main reasons that the Kingsolver family undertakes their locavore experiment is to eliminate as much fuel cost from their food as possible. Kingsolver explains here just how impactful to the environment it would be if others did the same. The fuel cost of just one meal for everyone in the US is in the billions of barrels of oil, and all of the pollution that comes along with its production and use.

“Most people of my grandparents’ generation had an intuitive sense of agricultural basics: when various fruits and vegetables come into season, which ones keep through the winter, how to preserve others. On what day autumn’s first frost will likely fall on their county, and when to expect the last one in spring. Which crops can be planted before the late frost, and which must wait. Which grains are autumn-planted. What an asparagus patch looks like in August. Most importantly: what animals and vegetables thrive in one’s immediate region, and how to live well on those, with little else thrown into the mix beyond a bag of flour, a pinch of salt, and a handful of coffee. Few people of my generation, and approximately none of our children, could answer any of those questions, let alone all. This knowledge has vanished from our culture.” 

Ignorance of even basic farming is one of the central cultural problems that Kingsolver is seeking to counteract with her book. She spends time exploring exactly how this knowledge disappeared after only a few generations, but though the lost is understandable, it is still tragic. Kingsolver rightly points out that lack of connection to farming the land makes it incredibly difficult for the average American to know much about what they are eating. One of her central arguments is that reconnecting with gardening and farming is the best way to regain an intuitive knowledge of food production.

“We also have largely convinced ourselves it wasn’t too important. Consider how many Americans might respond to a proposal that agriculture was to become a mandatory subject in all schools, alongside reading and mathematics. A fair number of parents would get hot under the collar to see their kids’ attention being pulled away from the essentials of grammar, the all-important trigonometry, to make room for down-on-the-farm stuff. The baby boom psyche embraces a powerful presumption that education is a key to moving away from manual labor and dirt—two undeniable ingredients of farming. It's good enough for us that somebody, somewhere, knows food production well enough to serve the rest of us with all we need to eat, each day of our lives.” 

One of the most troubling issues Kingsolver points out is American complacence with the current food culture—or lack thereof. Farming and knowing the origins of food is currently unimportant knowledge; as Kingsolver points out, parents would be outraged if schools taught this.