A thoughtful son sent Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, the new book Barbara Kingsolver has written with her husband, Steven Hopp, and daughter, Camille Kingsolver. It beautifully mixes the sweet pleasures of great food with bitter facts about conventional food production and transport. I find this book and the clear-mindedness behind it to be wonders.

From page 22: “Food is the rare moral arena in which the ethical choice is generally the one more likely to make you groan with pleasure.” Yes!!

From page 2, in one of many special sections Steven Hopp wrote: “Each food item in a typical U.S. meal has traveled an average of 1,500 miles….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. That’s not gallons, but barrels.”

From page 68: “Transporting a single calorie of a perishable fresh fruit from California to New York takes about 87 calories worth of fuel.”

We’ve got some changing to do. And it’s going to be delicious.

My fraternity — aka the National Peace Corps Association — is working for changes in the 2007 U.S. Farm Bill. One partner organization, Oxfam America, has developed a “Fairness in the Field” vision for the Farm Bill that includes these aims:

•Reduce funding for commodity subsidies that distort trade, and shift resources
to alternative investments in rural America.
•Shift taxpayer dollars to programs that help conserve land for future generations,
support a broad variety of farm products,and help poor and minority farmers.
• Shift taxpayer dollars to programs that can create markets for healthy foods in the
same regions where farmers live—in school cafeterias,farmers markets,local
grocery stores,hospitals,and nursing homes.
• Invest in roads,bridges,and broadband technology in rural America to generate
new jobs and strengthen small businesses.

Photo is of Sharon Stratton, Hoot Owl Holler Farm

I’m quoting here from an email promoting the Kitchen Gardeners International newsletter: “One part Victory Garden, one part American Idol, the Grow-Off Show-Off pits gardeners against one another in a friendly, light-hearted creativity competition to see who can come up the cleverest and most effective ways of singing the praises of home-grown foods.”
Billed as “no holds barred.” Isn’t there a gardening or growing metaphor that would work there?

Friendly or “no holds barred,” it’s got to be interesting: an organic gardening competition.

I have been working on an article about whether local food is too cheap to allow our local growers to thrive. I began to wonder about local fair trade efforts. We want local growers to grow our food right here. We would like our trade with them to be fair - yes? I was particularly interested in chicken, since that had become the article’s focus. I found some intriguing news:

• A call for Domestic Fair Trade: Wholesome Harvest - a coalition of 40 small farms selling their own organic meats. Their motto: “Eat well, save the earth…and the small farms on it.”

• How about a whole town committed to Fair Trade? Check out Wolfville, Nova Scotia.

Come on Lexington, Georgetown, Danville, Berea, central Kentucky. Let’s be a Fair Trade region.

U.S. Department of Agriculture figures for 2005 show we in this country spent 5.8 percent of our disposable income on food to eat at home, and another 4.1 percent of our income on eating out. Our 9.9 percent total “food budget share” is the lowest in the world. Compare with food budget shares in other rich countries where we think of the food as particularly fine: France: 15.34 percent. Italy: 16.59 percent.

I must add, even though I cannot prove a connection between good food and long life, that these two countries also occupy spots 10 and 15, respectively, in the 2005 international life expectancy rankings, while the U.S.A. holds down position number 45. Even if correlation ain’t causation, what about the good fortune of living a really long time in a place where the food is spectacular?? With government-paid health care? Child care? And looooooooong vacations.

I discovered this interesting article, part of an interesting series, while working on a new piece for Nougat Magazine. In spite of all manner of reasons why it seems wrong to say so, I am working on a way to say that our obsession with paying the lowest possible price for food is costing us, not helping us.