Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: Quote Selection Two

For all the talk that politicians on the left as well as the right make about America being a democracy, we are not. We never have been. In fact, founding father Benjamin Franklin wrote: “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!” This is why James Madison promoted a republic in The Federalist Papers. In Number 51, he wrote: “It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part.”

Republicanism {as a political process, not a political party} protects minorities from majorities. Originally, it protected the rural parts of the country from being dictated to by densely populated cities. I can tell you, having my entire life watched the farmers in my area battle politicians from San Francisco for water rights, that city politicians don’t understand the needs of country folk, nor do they acknowledge that what is in the best interest of the farmer would be in the best interest of the city as well, since that is where they get their food.

All of this is to frame my first quote from Kingsolver, which concerns this country-mouse-city-mouse battlefront {and would someone please explain this to President Bush??}:

The policy of our nation is made in cities, controlled largely by urban voters who aren’t well-informed about the changes on the face of our land, and the men and women who work it.

[snip]

For much of U.S. history, rural regions have been treated essentially as colonial property of the cities.

I expected Kingsolver to be a vegetarian or a vegan. Her politics seemed to line up perfectly, and she seemed health-conscious enough to pull it off without any major health repercussions. But she isn’t, and she explains why. She begins by musing about a young Hollywood starlet who is vegan and fantasizes about building a haven for domestic animals where they are safe from harvest:

We know she meant well, and as fantasies of the super-rich go, it’s more inspired than most. It’s just the high-mindedness that rankles; when moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot-air balloon that’s awfully hard not to poke. The farm-liberation fantasy simply reflects a modern cultural confusion about farm animals. They’re human property, not just legally but biologically. Over the millenia of our clever history, we created from wild progenitors whole new classes of beasts whose sole purpose was to feed us. If turned loose in the wild, they would haplessly starve, succumb to predation, and destroy the habitats and lives of most or all natural things. If housed at the public expense they would post a more immense civic burden than our public schools and prisons combined. No thoughtful person really wants those things to happen. But living at a remove from the actual workings of a farm, most humans no longer learn appropriate modes of thinking about animal harvest.

[snip]

On our farm we don’t especially enjoy processing our animals, but we do value it, as an important ritual for ourselves and any friends adventurous enough to come and help, because of what we learn from it. We reconnect with the purpose for which these animals were bred. We dispense with all the delusions about who put the live in livestock and who must take it away.

She had some comments about vegetarianism that I hadn’t heard before:

Most humans could well consume more vegetable foods, and less meat. But globally speaking, the vegetarian option is a luxury. The oft-cited energetic argument for vegetarianism, that it takes ten times as much land to make a pound of meat as a pound of grain, only applies to the kind of land where rain falls abundantly on rich topsoil. Many of the world’s poor live in marginal lands that can’t support plant-based agriculture. Those not blessed with the fruited plain and amber waves of grain must make do with woody tree pods, tough-leaved shrubs, or sparse grasses. Camels, reindeer, sheep, goats, cattle, and other ruminants are uniquely adapted to transform all those types of indigestible cellulose into edible milk and meat. The fringes of desert, tundra, and marginal grasslands on every continent–coastal Peru, the southwestern United States, the Kalahari, the Gobi, the Australian outback, northern Scandinavia–are inhabited by herders. The Navajo, Mongols, Lapps, Masai, and countless other resourceful tribes would starve without their animals.

Kingsolver echoes something my father has told me in the past, which also seems to be a simplistic summary of Rudolph Steiner’s biodynamic farming method:

[W]ell-managed grazing can actually benefit natural habitats where native grazers exist or formerly existed.

Kingsolver wasn’t afraid to cook with her children, even when they were small. She writes:

Cooking is 80 percent confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice.

Fans of dessert everywhere will be thrilled to hear that Kingsolver extols indulging in pie on Thanksgiving and Christmas! She writes:

[M]ost of America’s excess pounds were not gained on national holidays. After a certain age we can’t make a habit of pie, certainly, but it’s a soul-killing dogma that says we have to snub it even on Thanksgiving. Good people eat. So do bad people, skinny people, fat people, tall and short ones. Heaven help us, we will never master photosynthesis.

Living like this–where you grow your own food, preserve it, and eat it throughout the year {with only minor supplementation from a local farmer’s market} is a choice:

In a culture that assigns nil prestige to domestic work, I usually self-deprecate when anyone comments on my gardening and cooking-from-scratch lifestyle. I explain that I have to do something brainless to unwind from my work, and I don’t like TV. But the truth is, I enjoy this so-called brainless work. I like the kind of family I can raise on this kind of food.

Kingsolver discusses poultry a lot in this book, and I found it all very fascinating. She explains how modern breeds have had the ability to reproduce on their own completely bred out of them. Modern chickens and turkeys are artificially inseminated, eggs are extracted and then raised by machines in incubators where robots systematically turn the eggs. Makes me wonder what a power-outage would do to the poultry industry:

Having no self-sustaining bloodlines to back up the industry is like having no gold standard to underpin paper currency. Maintaining a naturally breeding poultry flock is a rebellion, at the most basic level, against the wholly artificial nature of how foods are produced.

On raising certain types of children:

[T]he ultimate act of failure is to raise helpless kids…Kids who can explain how supernovas are formed may not be allowed to get dirty in play group, and many teenagers who could construct and manage a Web site would starve if left alone on a working food farm.

That is almost the end of my quote selection. I have two remaining, both of which deserve their own posts. The first explains the beauty of the rooster, something that will foster a new appreciation for the Creator. The second explains the worldview of the book, the reason why I can agree with Kingsolver on so much, appreciate her writing, seek to live a somewhat similar lifestyle, and yet feel, in the end, that we are worlds apart.

Stay tuned.
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Other Posts Concerning Animal, Vegetable, Miracle:

Economics as a Form of Community
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: Quote Selection One
What to Look For in a Rooster
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: Final Review