It’s August and Barbara Kingsolver and family are drowning in tomatoes. But not the kind of tomatoes that we usually buy from the grocery store—the ones she describes as “slightly sour water with a mealy texture”—but meaty, heirloom tomatoes. After eating a salad made out of avocado and our friend’s farm’s tomatoes (recipe here—P.S. don’t even try to make it with grocery store tomatoes…it will NOT work) I was a convert. At Thanksgiving almost everything on our table contained meat, so I ate a tomato sandwich. Made out of an heirloom tomato that my uncle had grown. Grow your own tomatoes!
And how cool would it be to make and can your own tomato sauce? Way cooler than making and canning your own apple butter (I am still not exactly sure what this is and the name gives no hints. I guess it’s like a spread..?) which was what I was forced to do by my mother a couple years ago after our lovely neighbors gave us a paper grocery bag full of apples they picked. And making and canning the apple butter was actually not all that bad compared to eating the apple butter. My mother had to hand out jars as gifts. So moral of the story: before you put a lot of work into canning, actually pick something you like.
Chapter 16 is in the same tone of 13: still harvesting, different plants. Kingsolver makes a great suggestion to buy a fresh pumpkin instead of canned pumpkin for baking needs. Or you could go the extra mile and grow pumpkins. Two summers ago I attempted to grow pumpkins and ended up growing a single pumpkin. The pumpkin was supposed to be of the variety of giant pumpkin and ended up being diminutive and quite watery, but I still carved it and put it on my porch.
So the title of chapter 14 is “You Can’t Run Away on Harvest Day” which features a picture of a axe stuck in a stump. Yeah. I thought was alluding to the amount of work that was required to pick all of the vegetables. Nope. They are killing their animals. The eerie way Kingsolver set up the scene scared me. Like I almost expected Hannibal Lector to appear and say, “Tell me Clarice—have the lambs stopped screaming?”. She illustrates the fact that killing animals occurs indirectly because of all farming—pesticides poisoning animals, To a Mouse situations where animals lose their homes or even lives to planting—which I believe is a somewhat valid point. She spends a lot of time trying to condone pasture-raised animal deaths by explaining how much freedom they have and how great their life is, but really it made me feel better about my decision to not eat meat. I feel like she tries to make the killing sound humane, but her joke about chicken feathers clinging everywhere after the butchering was not really funny.
I really liked chapter 15 because it pretty much carried the message that food is not that important to Americans, the very idea we have been trying to change all year. Think of the American genre of food: burgers and fries? We don’t really have to put much thought into that. Everywhere else it seems that food is still an art.
