“Animal Dreams” still ranks up there among my favorite novels, and I have read everything Barbara Kingsolver has written since (I think). So I was very excited to learn that her latest book was about an issue that has become so important to me.

Last night, she was in Berkeley on her book tour, but this reading was a benefit for both the Edible Schoolyard and the Ecology Center’s Farmers Markets. It didn’t get quite the same showing as the Michael Pollan-John Mackey debate, but considering tickets weren’t free, there were several hundred people. The church where I have attended High Holiday services for the past years was pretty close to full.

Kingsolver was accompanied by her husband, Steven L. Hopp, who has contributed to the book, but last night, he worked the computer slide show. Since her book, “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” is about her family’s attempt to eat only local food for an entire year, growing and raising most of it themselves on a farm in Virginia, we saw numerous slides of their garden – and what a garden it was.

I have always been deeply moved by Kingsolver’s descriptive prose, and last night was no exception. She had the audience in hysterics as she described how she intently watched turkeys mating, something that never happens in industrial turkey farms, and then ended her presentation with a short movie clip of said turkeys.

But she also almost brought a tear to my eye, talking about some of her tomato-growing colleagues, who thought they had made deals with local supermarkets to purchase their organic tomatoes, and then, at the last minute, the markets went with cheaper ones flown in from Southern California.

“It’s not your fault,” she told us, jokingly. “It was Southern California.”

Here is an excerpt from the chapter called “Life in a Red State:”

“In high summer, about the time I was seeing red in my kitchen, the same thing was happening to some of our county’s tomato farmers. They had learned organic methods, put away the chemicals, and done everything right to grow a product consumers claimed to want. They’d waited the three years for certification. They’d watered, weeded, and picked, they’d sorted the round from the misshapen, producing the perfect organic tomatoes ordered by grocery chains. And then suddenly, when the farmers were finally bringing in these tomatoes by the truckload and hoping for a decent payout, some grocery buyers backtracked. “Not this week,” one store offered without warning, and then another. Not the next week either, nor the next. A tomato is not a thing that can be put on hold. Mountains of ripe fruits piled up behind the packing house and turned to orange sludge, swarming with clouds of fruit flies.

These tomatoes were perfect, and buyers were hungry. Agreements had been made. But pallets of organic tomatoes from California had begun coming in just a few dollars cheaper. It’s hard to believe, given the amount of truck fuel involved, but transportation is tax-deductible for the corporations, so we taxpayers paid for that shipping. The California growers only needed the economics of scale on their side, a cheap army of pickers, and customers who would reliably opt for the lower price.

As simply as that, a year of planning and family labor turned to red mush.”
She goes on to say that some of the farmers found a way to donate the tomatoes to a food bank for needy families in the area. But then one of them told her: “We were glad we could give it away. We like to be generous and help others, that’s fine, that’s who we are. But a lot of us are barely making ends meet, ourselves. It seems like it’s always the people that have the least who end up giving the most. Why is that?”

I don’t usually recommend books I haven’t read myself yet, but I will go out on a limb here and say read this book.