Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

This chapter describes the family’s first forays into raising and breeding their own poultry: chickens and turkeys. Lily leads the charge with the chickens in deciding to start her own egg business. The family orders live baby chicks from a hatchery, which Lily had carefully selected for their quality and egg color.

Kingsolver uses the story of the family’s chicken and turkey chicks to explore the poultry industry in the US. Although Americans eat a lot of turkey, “99 percent of them are a single bred: The Broad-Breasted White, a quick-fattening monster bred specifically for the industrial-scale setting” (90). The breeding has reduced the bird’s intelligence and rendered them incapable of reproducing naturally, so that they must be artificially inseminated. Kingsolver opts to raise one of only eight heritage turkey breeds: Bourbon Reds, which are natives of Kentucky.

Lily’s egg business idea grew out of her want of a horse, which Kingsolver challenged her to buy herself with the proceeds. She decides to sell both eggs and chicken meat, to make a bigger profit. Level-headed, she assures her mother “I won’t name them. I’ll have my old pet hens to love” because “pets are pets. Food is food” (96).

Another essay, “The Price of Life” from Hopp, explains industrial animal farming, usually called industrial farms or “concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs)” (91). These operations receive criticism for their treatment of animals and pollution, as well as the health concerns with the meat produced this way.

The chapter ends with Camille’s essay “Eating My Sister’s Chickens,” which describes the nutritional health benefits of eating free-range meats. They supply needed minerals and are much healthier than even vegetarian and vegan options in many cases. 

This chapter largely involves the family’s first major challenge in their local food experiment. Kingsolver is celebrating her birthday in early May, so the family is throwing a party and will have a large crowd to feed. However, most common large-scale recipes would require lots of imported, out of season food.

They decide to see what local farmers have available, and build a menu from there, which “is surely the world’s most normal way of organizing parties—the grape revels of Italy and France in September, the Appalachian ramp hoedowns in April, harvest festivals wherever and whenever a growing season ends” (103). In the end, they pull together a feast with local ingredients, grass-fed chicken and lamb, and “an enormous salad of spring greens” (104).

There’s also an account of the Appalachian tradition of giving away tomato plants on Mother’s Day, and the tradition of never thanking anyone for a plant. Otherwise, “the plant will wither up straightaway and die. They have lots of stories to back this up” (101).

The chapter ends with Camille’s essay “Happy Returns,” which gives her account of the birthday party and includes several recipes used on the night.

During a period of rest on the farm between work-intensive vegetable seasons, the family takes a trip, during which they visit Amy, who grows local produce in Massachusetts, helped in part by several greenhouses. She sells produce to local restaurants and trades with neighbors for things like eggs, dairy, and meat. However, “this perfectly organic operation is not certified organic. Amy estimates certification would cost her $700 a year, and she wouldn’t gain that much value from it” (121).

Kingsolver uses Amy’s example to explain why “farming is not for everybody; increasingly it’s hardly for anybody. Over the last decade our country has lost an average of 300 farms a week” (113). Not only are industrial farming operations eating up the small family farms, but “farmers have to contend with a national press that is quick to pronounce them dead” and “a perception of organic food as an elite privilege is considered an obstacle to the farmer growing for middle-income customers whose highest food-shopping priority is the lowest price” (114-15). This logic insisting that “our food has to be cheap is like commanding a ten-year-old to choose a profession and move out of the house now, it violates the spirit of enterprise. It guarantees bad results” (116). And the result is increasingly unhealthy food causing obesity, disease, and shorter lifespans.

Still, “these producers can’t survive by catering only to the upscale market either” because the industrial farms have also found ways to label their food “organic,” and consumers are often deceived by this label (114). However, “‘locally-grown; is a denomination whose meaning is incorruptible”

 (123).

Hopp’s short essay in this chapter, “Paying the Price of Lower Prices,” explores how the perception that organic food costs much more to produce is incorrect due to the fuel cost and the harm done to the soil.