Viewpoint: Lily’s Chickens

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I understand the power implicit in these choices. That I have such choices at all is a phenomenal privilege in a world where so many go hungry, even as our nation uses food as a political weapon, embargoing grain shipments to places such as Nicaragua and Iraq. I find both security and humility in feeding myself as best I can, and learning to live within the constraints of my climate and seasons. I like the challenge of organizing our meals as my grandmothers did, starting with the question of season and which cup is at the moment running over. I love to trade recipes with my gardening friends, and join in their cheerful competition to see who can come up with the most ways to conceal the identity of a zucchini squash.

If we are blessed with an abundance of choices about food, we are surely also obliged to consider the responsibility implicit in our choices. There has never been a more important time to think about where our food comes from. We could make for ourselves a safer nation, overnight, simply by giving more support to our local food economies and learning ways of eating and living around a table that reflects the calendar. Our families, of course, will never need to be as beholden to the seasons as the Native Americans who called February by the name “Hungry Month,” and I’m grateful for that. But we can try to live close enough to the land’s ordinary time that we notice when something is out of place and special. My grandfather Kingsolver used to tell me with a light in his eyes about the boxcar that came through Kentucky on the L&N line when he was a boy — only once a year, at Christmas — carrying oysters and oranges from the coast. Throughout my own childhood, every year at Christmastime while an endless burden of wants burgeoned around everybody else, my grandfather wanted only two things: a bowl of oyster soup and an orange. The depth of his pleasure in that meal was so tangible, even to a child, that my memory of it fills me with wonder at how deeply fulfillment can blossom from a cultivated ground of restraint.

I remember this as I struggle — along with most parents I know — to make clear distinctions between love and indulgence in raising my children. I honestly believe that material glut can rob a child of certain kinds of satisfaction — though deprivation is no picnic, either. And so our family indulges in exotic treats on big occasions. A box of Portuguese clementines one Christmas is still on Lily’s catalog of favorite memories, and a wild turkey we got from Canada one Thanksgiving remains on my own. We enjoy these kinds of things spectacularly because at our house they’re rare.

And yes, we eat some animals, in careful deference to the reasons for avoiding doing so. I don’t really feel, as some have told me, that it’s a sin to eat anything with a face, nor do I believe it’s possible to live by that rule unless one maintains a certain degree of purposeful ignorance. Butterflies and bees and locusts all have faces, and they die like lambs to the slaughter (and in greater numbers) whenever a field of vegetable food is sprayed or harvested. Faceless? Not the birds that eat the poisoned insects, the bunnies sliced beneath the plow, the foxes displaced from the forest-turned-to-organic-wheat field, and so on. If the argument is that meat comes from higher orders of life than those creatures, I wonder how the artificial, glassy-eyed construct of a bovine life gets to weigh more than the wiles of a fox or the virtuosity of a songbird. Myself, I love wild lives at least as much as tame ones, and eating costs lives. Even organic farmers kill crop predators in ways that aren’t pretty, so a vegetable diet doesn’t provide quite the sparkling karma one might wish. Most soybeans grown in this country are genetically engineered in ways that are anathema to biodiversity. So drinking soy milk, however wholesome it may be, doesn’t save animals.

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