'Lympus Couple Fills in Ponds
To Avoid Taxes on Them
By Bill Busha

A typical food item on the shelf of a U.S. grocery store has traveled farther than most families go on their annual vacations- an average of 1500 miles, writer Barbara Kingsolver told more than 200 listeners in South Royalton last week.

And getting that food to the consumer takes huge amounts of energy, about 400 gallons of oil a year per citizen, or 17% of the nation's energy use.

If every U.S. citizen ate just one meal a week of locally and organically raised meats and produce, she explained, we would reduce our country's oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels, every week.

Kingsolver, noted author of more than a dozen successful novels including "The Bean Tree" and "The Poisonwood Bible," was at the Vermont Law School Friday evening to promote her latest book, "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle- A Year of Food Life." The book is a non-fiction chronicle of her family's experiment to subsist for a year on food they either had grown themselves or purchased locally.

The presentation was the second Vermont appearance of the day for Kingsolver, who spoke at a reception a few hours earlier at the Farmers Diner in Quechee. More than 100 people attended the earlier event, paying a $45 entry fee that would in part benefit the Northeast Organic Farmers of Vermont and Valley Food and Farm, two non-profit groups that work to promote locally grown food.

The book, as well as the food experiment, was a family project. Husband Steven Hopp, a professor in environmental studies at Emory and Henry College, contributed essays that explore the economic and environmental impacts of both industrial-scale agriculture, and small, organically certified farms.

Kingsolver's 19-year-old daughter Camille, who would go off to Duke University midway though the experiment, wrote several food-related sidebars, including numerous recipes that are sprinkled throughout the narrative.

And youngest daughter Lily, nine, who did not contribute to the writing of the book, figured prominently in the slide show that accompanied the talk.

"She became our hands model," laughed Kingsolver, referring to the numerous photographs showing cupped hands holding the bounty of the family's farm. Lily also became the family poultry expert and egg vendor.

Change of Locale

The first step in the project was a big one- a move across the country, from Tucson, Ariz., where Kingsolver had lived half her life, to a small farm in Southern Appalachia that her husband had owned for two decades. He had bought the place in his bachelor days and the family had spent many recent summers there.

While living in the Southwest, they had raised chickens, dabbled in gardening, and patronized farmers markets. But when it came to producing food on a larger scale, they were concerned about the region's water supply. Gardens are thirsty things, she says, and Arizona is continuing to draw down aquifers faster than they can be replenished.

Once settled on their southern Virginia homestead and assured of ample precipitation, it was time to set the ground rules that would govern the new eating plan- and to decide on how those rules could be bent without going astray from the integrity of their experiment.

They reached a compromise by granting each family member one luxury item that would not be available locally.

Granting One Wish

Her husband was quick to claim coffee as his exception. "I came to understand that to him, coffee can get you through a time of no food better than food can get you through a period of no coffee," she joked, drawing laughter and nods of agreement from the crowd.

Camille chose dried fruit, the closest she could get to the fresh fruit that she craved year round, and Lily opted for hot chocolate.

But those luxuries would have their own stipulations: each would be purchased through fair trade organizations that work with farmers around the world to ensure that growers receive a reasonable price for their goods.

They expanded the garden size to 3500 square feet, established relationships with local farmers from whom they could buy products they chose not to raise themselves, ordered laying hens through the mail, and started a flock of Bourbon Red turkeys, one of eight "heritage breeds" of the bird that still exist in this country.

"We wanted a flock of birds that would reproduce on their own, so we could have an ongoing meat supply," she said.

Of the 400 million turkeys Americans consume each year, more than 99% of them are a single breed- the Broad-Breasted White, she said.

"These are quick-growing monster birds bred for industrial-scale settings. If one were to escape slaughter, it probably wouldn't live to be a year old. They get so heavy that its legs wouldn't be able to support it. In a mature form, they are incapable of flying, foraging, and even mating." .

Asparagus First

They began their eating plan in the spring, targeting asparagus as the first garden item they could use. In that part of the country, that was mid-April.

Through summer and into the fall, the family lived bounteously from the garden produce and local fruit, and stocked the larder with canned and frozen goods that would carry them through the long winter months.

By their accounts, the family lived very well, adapting recipes to the ingredients available in a given month. The mouth-watering list includes asparagus and morel pizza, (made from scratch, with a whole wheat crust) melon salsa, roast chicken with fresh bread and salad greens, holiday corn pudding, and of course, some 300 pounds of roast turkey for hearty main meals, soups and sandwiches.

"Eating home-cooked meals from whole, in-season ingredients obtained from the most local source available is eating well, in every sense," Kingsolver says. "Good for the habitat, good for the body."

At the end of the year, Kingsolver calculated that the family's food costs worked out to about 50 cents per person, per meal, or a monthly food budget for a family of $182.50.

"Cooking at home is cheaper than buying packaged foods or restaurant meals of comparable quality," she says. "The main barrier standing between ourselves and a local-food culture is not price, but attitude."

What Next?

Have they continued to eat in a similar way once the yearlong experiment ended, asked a member of the audience? Yes, said Steven Hopp, who joined his wife at the podium to answer questions at the end of the evening.

"We go out to eat a little more often now," he said. "But once you discover how much better local or home-grown fresh food is, it's hard to go back to the long-distance selection at the supermarket."

Kingsolver concluded her presentation by suggesting that the upcoming election season would be a good time to begin a political dialog, because the Farm Bill is up for renewal this year.

The nation's Farm Bill dictates subsidies for food production in the country, and is renewed every five years.

"On the one hand, we have the Surgeon General encouraging the American public to eat more fruits and vegetables. And on the other, we have a Farm Bill that in the past, through huge subsidies, has encouraged the large scale production of crops that end up in junk food, like high-fructose corn syrup."

"Wouldn't it be great if some of those subsidies could be re-directed to support smaller-scale production and organic practices at the local level," she said.

Kingsolver and her family have created a companion web site to the book, animalvegetablemiracle.com that contains information about the project, photos of the farm, and numerous links to food-related topics including local food, sustainable agriculture, food security, and food policy.