Have I got your attention? Good. I promise you, this diary will feature some steaming hot turkey sex. Or talk of it, anyway. No video.
Book Review of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
Perhaps you remember, if you attended the YearlyKos food panel, Kerry Trueman's top book recommendation. It was Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver. I read the book too, and thoroughly enjoyed it (particularly the part about the turkeys), so I'll add my voice to Kerry's in recommending it.
Two reasons I've heard the book praised are:
- It's an excellent way to familiarize yourself with eating seasonally if you've got NO idea whether you should look for asparagus in May or October.
- It's not particularly partisan, so you can give it as a gift to your rightwing relatives to subtley convert them to local eating without setting them off.
A third compliment I'll add: It's charming, from start to finish. I love her characterizations of her daughters, her husband, herself - and especially, her turkeys.
(Small update: the book has a great website: http://www.animalvegetablemiracle.com/ )
The "plot" of the book is simple: a family commits to eating locally for an entire year and then records their experience in a book. The reality is slightly less simple, because Kingsolver is a talented author. Perhaps the experience or the food would be the same if any other family undertook such an experiment, but the resulting book is most certainly more captivating than it would be otherwise.
Additionally, Kingsolver's husband, Steven Hopp, contributes blurbs connecting food to larger issues and her oldest daughter Camille adds her perspective along with recipes and menus. Her younger daughter, Lily (my favorite "character"), passionately develops her own chicken and egg operation, hoping to one day buy a horse.
As the yearlong experiment begins, the family sets its ground rules. They will begin as soon as the first asparagus comes up and grow or raise as much of their own food as possible while purchasing the rest locally. Each family member is allowed one luxury item: coffee, dried fruit, hot chocolate, and non-local spices.
The year begins much as you'd expect - with scarcity. Despite the abundance of asparagus and the farmers' market's selection of onions, meats, baby lettuce, walnuts, honey, jam, and rhubarb, there was no fresh fruit to be found. Better wait a few weeks if you want that. In our society of 24-hour groceries and Walmart Supercenters, this is simply a foreign concept. On the other hand, food becomes far more precious when you have to wait for it to come in season.
Since January, Kingsolver had been starting seedlings indoors, waiting for the moment it was warm enough to plant them outdoors. She spends her winter nights poring over seed catalogs like we hungrily read DailyKos diaries, awaiting the day she can once again get to work in the garden. I'm no gardener, but her fantastic descriptions of heirloom fruits and veggies even get me excited.
Once the growing season really warms up (no pun intended), the family takes on more interesting challenges - such as how do you throw an enormous birthday bash or go on vacation without giving up your commitment to eating local?
In the peak of summer, the family is up to its eyeballs in ripe veggies. When January hits, dinner will be easy-peasy - home made pasta with frozen pesto, for example - but the time to think about January is August. Inhabitants of snowy climates expect to encounter of scarcity (as my mom put it, "What do I do if I want arugula in the winter?"), but far more shocking was the opposite problem. Kingsolver devotes entire chapters to her family's adventures with too much squash and too many tomatoes.
The family does far more than grow fruits and veggies. Steven makes the bread from scratch and Kingsolver even makes her own cheese. I never thought of cheese as something you could make, but after reading this book, I'm rather eager to try it. By the way, if you are a lactose intolerant cheese-lover, making your own might be a solution for you.
Last but not least, they raise their own chickens and of turkeys. Turkeys, nowadays, are mostly one breed, created to meet our demand. They have huge breasts - so big in fact that they cannot mate the normal way. Even after Bush pardons one or two each November, they are unable to survive much longer because their proportions simply aren't natural.
As an act of rebellion, Kingsolver raises a heritage breed of turkeys called Bourbon reds. She's determined to let them live as turkeys were meant to live, including mating the turkey way. (Note: If you'd like to be a co-conspirator, order a heritage breed turkey for Thanksgiving.)
Her male turkeys are very eager to mate the turkey way from the get go. You might pronounce them honor students, but be aware that they aren't quite sure what they are supposed to mate with. To a male turkey, sometimes a watering can can look positively seductive.
Once the female turkeys' hormones catch up to the over-eager males' she begins searching for guidance anywhere she can find it... and comes up empty. Turkeys haven't done it the turkey way for so long that there simply isn't any advice out there.
In the meantime, one of the turkeys (who Kingsolver nicknamed Lolita for her sexual prowess at a young age) has the hots for Steven. You've got to wonder what it's like, not only playing turkey matchmaker but also defending your husband from a horny turkey!
The antics don't stop once Lolita & co. figure out that they are supposed to mate with each other instead of watering cans and Kingsolver's husband. Apparently no one told them they were supposed to sit on their own eggs. Or at least, sit on them for more than a few minutes. Modern technology gives us artificial insemination and incubators but you've got to wonder how turkeys survived as a species before humans came along to procreate for them.
Whether you already try to eat locally or you are just curious as to how it might be done, I strongly recommend Animal, Vegetable, Mineral. You might not be able to drop everything and plant a garden to sustain your family year-round, but you'll certainly come away with food for thought (and more than a few ideas on how to localize your diet). Most of all, you'll want to raise your own flock of heritage breed turkeys!