Locavores, or I feel bad about my diet

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle - Barbara Kingsolver (HarperCollins, 2007)

So it may or may not be the case that at one point the reader sat down with both this book on a year of local eating and a bag from McDonalds. I can promise you that if it were the case, this reader was aware of how incongruous and embarrassing it was.

In short, Kingsolver and her family (husband, two daughters) moved full-time to their property in Virginia, and after some time settling in, embarked on a year of knowing the provenance of their food. Most of it, they grew themselves (either in the plant or animal husbandry sense). While this was a big commitment (duh) this was a foodie family that had roots in the world of fresh, local, home-grown food. They had grown up with gardens; they cooked with fresh ingredients; the youngest had already been raising chickens. This contributed to the success of their project - imagine if they didn't already know how to cook - and helped communicate that the kinds of lifestyle changes involved are not (or at least don't need to be) great hardships. On the other hand, they started out from a point so far beyond where many American families currently reside... it's easy to get overwhelmed and think, this will never work for me.

I'm not a cook. I don't get excited about it. I wish I did. It seems so romantic in Kingsolver's description. It makes me want to try harder. At the very least, maybe I'll start going to farmer's markets again so that at least I know what's in season, even if I refuse to give up my bananas. (Hell, I live in Southern California - I have more access to fresh produce than almost anyone else in the country.)

As the book was winding down, I was planning this post around a frustration that I didn't real feel connected to what was happening in their lives. I didn't get a sense of adventure. I didn't see how it fit into the rest of the narrative of their lives (and apparently it was an eventful year). And then I got to the chapter about turkey mating and was utterly won over. And then I came to the final chapter, where Kingsolver confronts my troubles as a reader:

I am old enough to know I should never, ever, trust I've explained anything perfectly. Some part of the audience will always remain at large, confused or plain unconvinced. As I wind up this account, I'm weighing that. Is it possible to explain the year we had?

This question, more than anything, made me feel comfortable with the book. It acknowledged the distance that would always remain, and I appreciated that.

Plus, seriously, fresh and local food. I promise.

Festival of Books, Day 1

It was that time of year again, where I drop everything and spend the weekend traipsing around UCLA. I was choosier this year about panels, but still spent 8 hours at the Festival on Saturday.

My morning began with a trip around the grounds before heading to "Food Fight: When Did Eating Get Controversial?" moderated by Times columnist Russ Parsons. Joining him were three professors: sociologist Barry Glassner (USC), nutrition scientist Marion Nestle (NYU), and journalist Michael Pollan (Cal). Discussion ranged from GMOs to industrial farming to the rise of farmers markets to the cultural identities involved in eating. And probably more. Calories and corn made several appearances as well. I was utterly taken with Nestle, who was joyful and enthusiastic. I imagine she is amazing in the classroom (not to imply that the others aren't). Several books going on my list after this.

Next up, a trip across campus to the oddly named "Fiction: Jumping Off the Page," I guess referring to the vivid nature of these writer's prose. And the writers? A uniformly witty crew: Chris Bohjalian, Peter Orner, Gary Shteyngart (the only of the writers I knew before), and Marianne Wiggins, whose name was familiar but unplaced. The authors discussed their upcoming/most recent books, their writing habits and styles, how they are best friends with their editors, and... oh, and lots of comments about various quirks and neuroses. I want to read all of their books now. And I kind of have a crush on Orner.

Next came more wandering and time for reading the paper. And finally, a reading by T.C. Boyle. He read the story "Beat," a pulsing account of a adolescent boy's rendezvous with Jack Kerouac and his cohorts. He said, and I forget how often this is true, that there is something so valuable about hearing a work in the author's own voice. I would add that hearing it at all is a different and important way to experience fiction. Cadence and timing become important, and it's utterly unlike reading, where I see at least 5 or 6 words (if not more) at once. So that was cool, and of course he is himself an epitome of sorts of cool. And therefore a good way to end the day.

Day 1 Purchases:
"Save a Child, Save the World" t-shirt from Skirball, supporting International Relief Committee work in Darfur.

Day 1 Swag:
Ghiradelli chocolate squares
free copies of The Nation
soundtrack to Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, coming soon to HBO (plus bookmarks!)
BookTV totebag
Walt Disney Concert Hall magnet
Organic basil seeds from Toyota
Shake and light flashlight (also from Toyota)

Foodie in Action

I made it to the end of The Omnivore's Dilemma. I partook, vicariously, of Michael Pollan's four meals: industrial, organic, local, and foraged. I thought about my own food choices, and how to reconcile (or at least recognize) the contradictions within those choices.

The book was often bedtime reading, and there is just something about food that makes me sleepy, so it took a while to get all the way through. And I was still reading the final pages with Michael Pollan on stage before me (more on that later). But it was worth the long haul.

The mix of fun facts and lively language kept the book moving briskly. I love random statistics and explanations, so parts that should perhaps have been boring weren't. On the other hand, you could tell that Pollan wrote the sections piecemeal, and the editing process didn't remove places where he explained or cited the same information again and again. Repetition can turn me off. (Yes, I can hear the snide laughter from all of you who have been subjected to my stories multiple times.)

Anyway, some fun passages:

The first bias predisposes us toward sweetness, a taste that signals a particularly rich source of carbohydrate energy in nature. Indeed, even when we're otherwise sated, our appetite for sweet things persists, which is probably why dessert shows up in the meal when it does. A sweet tooth represents an excellent adaptation for an omnivore whose big brain demands a tremendous amount of glucose [...] The adult human brain accounts for 2 percent of our body weight but consumes 18 percent of our energy, all of which must come from a carbohydrate.

Excellent to have an excuse for my sugar cravings. And, regarding pigs aerating manure into compost by rooting for corn kernels...

Buried clear to their butts in composting manure, a bobbing sea of wriggling hams and corkscrew tails, these were the happiest pigs I'd ever seen.

In fact, witnessing this "essential piggyness" is key to Pollan's philosophical coming to terms with eating meat. I can't do that chapter (number 17) to justice, but suffice it to say that I was impressed. Which goes for the entire book, really.

Of Maize and Man

Everyone stop and groan at my awful pun.

But seriously, I am corn. So says Michael Pollan in The Omnivore's Dilemma. Because virtually every non-natural food item (even some organic ones) that I eat now embody our country's insane glut of corn. This isn't news to me, as I've been on a mission against high fructose corn syrup for awhile now, but it's still unbelievably depressing. And fascinating too, the way that corn and humans have achieved a symbiotic state - but a precarious one for both species.

Pollan's book is subtitled "A Natural History of Four Meals" and in the book he traces fast food, supermarket, organic, and "found" meals - one each - to their source, investigating the social, scientific, and political circumstances behind each. So far I'm still in the industrial meal, so I don't have a good basis of comparison, but I hope that the rest of the book is able to delve so fully into the basis of each meal. I've heard mixed - albeit overall positive - reviews about this, so we'll see.

(And also, um, stop shooting people. I mean, really.)