The Oldest Turkeys in America

I spent much of July reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Barbara Kingsolver's polemical memoir about her family's year spent eating mostly locally grown food, and becoming increasingly dogmatic myself about buying local. John claims, not without a trace of regret, that this book has "changed our lives." On the whole I found it an engaging and amusing story, and I learned a good deal about the politics and processes behind how food ends up at my local Stop & Shop.

An exception was the chapter about meat, which was too holier-than-thou even for my sanctimonious ass. Kingsolver spends this chapter (sorry, I can't tell you which because the book is already back at the library) arguing that the most righteous and healthy decision we can make about eating meat is to eat free range, grass fed poultry and meat from a farmer we know. Her husband and co-author Steven Hopp presents compelling data and a well stated argument for why factory farms, where animals are maintained in such small spaces that they are unable to move and contagions spread like wildfire, are to be avoided. He presents both the ethical perspective of our responsibility not to be cruel to our fellow creatures and the environmental arguments that they generate tons of waste that need not be--the waste of traditionally grazed animals fertilizes the very soil that grows their food. But cutting meat out altogether, Kingsolver suggests, is not only unhealthy, as we cannot get the protein we need without meat. It is environmentally problematic: soy-based and other meat substitutes consume exponentially more energy than locally raised meats because of where they are produced and the transport costs of getting them to our tables.

Kingsolver is on the shakiest ground, though, when she derides some teenaged starlet's "billowing ignorance" and "sanctimony" for stating in one of Kingsolver's daughter's entertainment magazines that she is a vegetarian for ethical reasons. Not only does she choose not to eat meat herself, this young actress would like to free all farm animals from captivity. Kingsolver suggests that this notion is naive because cows and chickens are so ignorant after generations of domesticity that they would be unable to survive without the care of humans. Therefore, we are obligated to continue to care for them. I haven't read the statements of this actress, as neither the author nor the source was cited in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, but it struck me as self-serving of Kingsolver to call the actress's moral position ignorant to further her own view that humans possess noblesse oblige toward the dumb animals they find so tasty. Her logic reminds me of all the folks who figure we have to stick it out in Iraq, because it's such a godawful mess, without being willing to take any responsibility for having created that mess.

Another issue I had with the book was the argument that what Kingsolver and her family did is a practical and affordable solution for all of us. She pats herself on the back for all of the money she saved by growing her own potatoes, tomatoes, onions, and dozens of other varieties of fruits and vegetables. Fortunately, most of us live in cities and do not have access to the acreage that Kingsolver farmed as part of her experiment. I say fortunately because farming, no matter how planfully and conscientiously done, is degrading to the local environment. What Kingsolver has achieved is lovely and delightful for her and her family, but not a viable use of resources for any more than an elite few in the United States.

A chapter I particularly enjoyed, though, with nary a raised hackle, described Kingsolver's attempts to raise a breeding flock of turkeys. According to Kingsolver, the vast majority of turkeys raised in the United States are hatched in the early spring, raised to have such enormous breasts that they cannot actually walk (not a problem in factory farms, where they can't move anyway!), and slaughtered sometime before Thanksgiving. Thus, when the half dozen or so chicks that she acquired (minus one tom, who by proving himself a menace to the hens in her flock earned himself a place of honor on the Kingsolver-Hopp Thanksgiving table) survived until the following mating season, they were among the most elderly of all domestic turkeys in the United States. And raising turkeys who have had all survival skills bred out of them proved no small task, from having to show the chicks that the feed she gave them was more nourishing than the commas and periods on the newspapers on the floor of their pen, to creating just the right atmosphere and lighting to make the toms and hens feel amorous around mating time. Kingsolver even describes the multiple various attempts she made to encourage her hens, who appeared to have lost all of the most fundamental bird instincts, to sit on their eggs to incubate them through the cold weeks until hatching time.

It's definitely an amusing story that will expand your awareness of the origins of your food, and perhaps make you more conscientious about what you buy, as it did for us (just look at all of the fabulous stuff from our New Haven farmer's market, pictured above). Don't bother with the recipes, though. The few I tried were blander versions of pretty pedestrian stuff you probably already make better yourself. I haven't yet sorted out how we'll continue this new lifestyle after the ground freezes.