Small Wonder (14 page)

Obviously, if you live in Manhattan, your child can't have chickens. But I'll wager you're within walking distance of a farmer's market where you can make the acquaintance of some farmers and buy what's in season. (I have friends in Manhattan who actually garden—on rooftops, and in neighborhood community plots.) In recent years nearly three thousand green markets have sprung up across the country, giving more than a hundred thousand farmers a place to sell their freshly harvested, usually organic produce to a regular customer base. In some seven hundred communities, both rural and urban (including inner-city New York), thousands of Americans are supporting their local food economies by signing up with Community-Supported Agriculture, a system that lets farmers get paid at planting time for produce that they then deliver weekly to their subscribers until year's end. Thousands of other communities have food co-operatives that specialize at least in organic goods, if not local ones, and promote commodities (such as bulk flours, cereals, oils, and spices) that minimize energy costs for packaging and shipping. Wherever you are, if you have a grocery store, you'll find something in there that is in season and hasn't spent half its life in a boxcar. The way to find out is to
ask
. If every U.S. consumer would earmark just ten dollars a month for local items, the consequences would be huge.

I realize there are deep, traditional divisions of class between white bread and whole wheat. I grew up among many people who would feel uncomfortable saying the word
organic
out loud. But I know I am witnessing a reordering of tradition when some of my rural Virginia neighbors who've heretofore grown, and chewed, tobacco become comfortable saying (and growing) “Chardonnay” and “Merlot grape.” A dear friend of mine who has gardened for over six decades using the fertilizers and pesticides recommended
by her farming father and husband, while they lived, confided to me not long ago that she'd secretly gone organic. (Her tomatoes that summer were some of her best ever.) It's clear that this movement is reaching across class lines, when farmers' markets redeem more than $100 million in food stamps each year. Community food-security initiatives in many areas are also working to link organic farmers with food banks and school lunch programs. Growing and eating are both infused with new politics.

Before anyone rules out eating locally and organically because it seems expensive, I'd ask him or her to figure in the costs paid
outside
the store: the health costs, the land costs, the big environmental Visa bill that sooner or later comes due. It's easy to notice that organic vegetables cost more than their chemically reared equivalents, but that difference is rarely the one consumers take home. A meal prepared at home from whole, chemical-free ingredients costs just pennies on the dollar paid for the highly processed agribusiness products that most Americans eat at restaurants or heat up in the microwave nearly every day. For every dollar we send to a farmer, fisherman, or rancher, we send between three and four to the shippers, processors, packagers, retailers, and advertisers. And there are countless other costs for that kind of food. Our history of overtaking the autonomy and economies of small countries with our large corporations, the wars and campaigns we wage to maintain our fossil-fuel dependency—these have finally brought us costs beyond our wildest fears. Cancer is expensive, too, as are topsoil loss and species extinction. The costs of global warming will bring us eventually to our knees. When I have to explain to my kids someday that, yes, back at the turn of the century we
did
know we were starting to cause catastrophic changes in the planet's climate that might end their lives prematurely, do I have to tell them we just couldn't be bothered to alter our convenience-food habits?

It doesn't, in principle, take more time to buy a local peach
than a world-weary banana, and cooking from whole ingredients is not prohibitively time-consuming, either. As a working mother I am possessive of my time; I have to log in hours on my job—about forty a week—my spouse does the same, and our kids require of us the usual amount of kid-attention. But sometimes our family outings involve picking apples. I can peel the fruit and cook it into pies, jam, and purees for flavoring yogurt while I listen to the news on the radio or hear about my kids' day at school. Like many busy families, we cook in quantity on the weekends and freeze portions for easy midweek dinners. And we've befriended some fascinating microbes that will stay up all night in our kitchen making yogurt, feta, neufchatel, and sourdough bread without adult supervision. (I think copulation is involved, but we're open-minded.) Gardening is the best way I know to stay fit and trim, so during garden season, when it's up to me to make the earth move, I don't waste hours at the gym. Eating this way requires organization and skills more than time. Our great-grandmas did all this, and they may not have had other employment, but they did have to skin hogs for shoe leather, cut stove wood, sew everybody's clothes, and make the soap to wash them. Sheesh. My kitchen's on Easy Street.

It seems to me that giving up junk foods and jet-lagged vegetables is something like giving up smoking: It takes some discipline at first, but in the long run it's hard to see the minus sign in the equation. If there's anyone left who still thinks eating organically is a bland, granola-crunching affair, he or she must have missed the boat back around midmorning in the Age of Aquarius. The movement has grown up. Most Europeans think we're fools to eat some of the tasteless gunk that passes for food in our supermarkets. The Italians who pioneered Slow Food have forged a conscientious movement for preserving farms and the culture of unique, sustainable foods, but their starting point was pure epicurean disgust with fast food and watery, transported vegetables. Now that I've gotten into local eating I can't quit, because I've inadvertently
raised children who are horrified by the taste of a store-bought tomato. Health is an issue, too: My growing girls don't need the hormones and toxins that lace American food in regulated quantities (the allowable doses are more about economic feasibility than about proven safety). But that is only part of the picture. Objecting to irresponsible agriculture for reasons of your personal health is a bit like objecting to having a nuclear power plant in your backyard for reasons of your view. My own two children are the smallest part of the iceberg. The millions of children in sub-Saharan Africa and other places now facing famine and historically unprecedented climatic extremes because of global warming—they are the rest of the iceberg.

Developing an intimate relationship with the processes that feed my family has brought me surprising personal rewards. I've tasted heirloom vegetables with poetic names—Mortgage Lifter tomato, Moon and Stars watermelon—whose flavors most never will know because they turn to pulp and vinegar in a boxcar. I've learned how to look a doe-goat right in the weird horizontal pupil of her big brown eye, sit down and extract her milk, and make feta cheese. (Step 1 is the hardest.) I've learned that with an unbreakable jar and the right music, a gang of kids can render butter from cream in eleven minutes flat. I've discovered a kind of citrus tree that withstands below-zero temperatures, almost extinct today but commonly grown by farm wives a hundred years ago. I've learned that the best-tasting vegetables on God's green earth are the ones our garden-wise foremothers bred for consumption, not hard travel. And I seem to be raising kids who like healthy food. When Lily streaks through the crowd at the farmer's market shouting, “Mama, look, they have
broccoli
, let's get a
lot!
”—well, heads do turn. Women have asked me, “How do you get one like that?”

I'm not going to tell you it's a done deal. If there were a bin of Twinkies at the farmer's market, the broccoli would go to rot.
Once upon a time, when I had my first baby, I believed that if I took care not to train her to the bad habits of sugar, salt, and fat, she would grow up not wanting those things. That delusion lasted exactly one year, until someone put a chocolate-frosted birthday confection in front of my sugar-free child and—how can I say this delicately?—she put her face in the cake. We humans crave sugar, fat, and salt because we evolved through thousands of years in which these dietary components were desperately scarce; those members of the tribe who most successfully glutted on them, when they found them, would store up the body fat to live through lean times and bear offspring. And now we've organized the whole enchilada around those latent biochemical passions—an early hominid's dream come true, a health-conscious mom's nightmare. If my cupboards were full of junk food, it would vanish, with no help from mice. We have our moments of abandon—Halloween, I've learned, is inescapable without a religious conversion—but most of the time my kids get other treats they've come to love. Few delicacies compare with a yellow-pear tomato, delicately sun-warmed and sugary, right off the vine. When I send the kids out to pick berries or fruit, I have to specify that at least
some
are supposed to go in the bucket. My younger daughter adores eating small, raw green beans straight off the garden trellis; I thought she was nuts till I tried them myself.

The soreness in my hamstrings at the end of a hard day of planting or hoeing feels good in a way that I can hardly explain—except to another gardener, who will know exactly the sweet ache I mean. My children seem to know it, too, and sleep best on those nights. I've found the deepest kind of physical satisfaction in giving my body's muscles, senses, and attentiveness over to the purpose for which they were originally designed: the industry of feeding that body and keeping it alive. I suspect that most human bodies have fallen into such remove from that original effort, we've precipitated an existential crisis that requires things like
shopping, overeating, and adrenaline-rush movies to sate that particular body hunger.

And so I hope our family's efforts at self-provision will not just improve the health and habitat of my children but also offer a life that's good for them, and knowledge they need. I wish all children could be taught the basics of agriculture in school along with math and English literature, because it's surely as important a subject as these. Most adults my age couldn't pass a simple test on what foods are grown in their home counties and what month they come into maturity. In just two generations we've passed from a time when people almost never ate a fruit out of season to a near-universal ignorance of what seasons mean. One icy winter I visited a friend in Manhattan who described the sumptuous meal she was making for us, including fresh raspberries. “Raspberries won't grow in the tropics,” I mused. “And they sure don't keep. So where would they come from in the dead of winter?” Without blinking she answered, “Zabar's!”

Apparently the guys running the show don't know much about agriculture, either, because the strategy of our nation is to run on a collision course with the possibility of being able to feed ourselves decently (or at all) in twenty years' time. I can't see how any animal could be this stupid; surely it's happening only because humans no longer believe food comes from dirt. Well, it does. Farmers are not just guys in overalls, part of the charming scenery of yesteryear; they are the technicians who know how to get teensy little seeds to turn into the stuff that comprises everything, and I mean
everything,
we eat. Is anybody paying attention? For every farm that's turned over to lawns and housing developments, a farmer is sent to work at the Nissan plant or the Kmart checkout line. What's lost with that career move is specific knowledge of how to gain food from a particular soil type, in a particular climate—wisdom that took generations to grow.

I want to protect my kids against a dangerous ignorance of
what sustains them. When they help me dig and hoe the garden, plant corn and beans, later on pick them, and later still preserve the harvest's end, compost our scraps, and then turn that compost back into the garden plot the following spring, they are learning important skills for living and maintaining life. I have also observed that they appreciate feeling useful. In fact, nearly all the kids I've ever worked with on gardening projects get passionate about putting seeds in the ground, to the point of earnest territoriality.

“Now,” I ask them when we're finished, “what will you do if you see somebody over here tromping around or riding a bike over your seedbeds?”

“
We'll tell them to get outta our vegables!”
shouted my most recent batch of five-year-old recruits to this plot of mine for improving the world one
vegable
at a time.

Maria Montessori was one of the first child advocates to preach the wisdom of allowing children to help themselves and others, thereby learning to feel competent and self-assured. Most of the teachers and parents I know agree, and they organize classrooms and homes that promote this. But in modern times it's not easy to construct opportunities for kids to feel very useful. They can pick up their toys or take out the trash or walk the dog, but all of these things have an abstract utility. How useful is it to help take care of a dog whose main purpose, as far as they can see, is to be taken care of?

Growing food for the family's table is concretely useful. Nobody needs to explain how a potato helps the family. Bringing in a basket of eggs and announcing, “Attention, everybody: FREE BREAKFAST” is a taste of breadwinning that most kids can attain only in make-believe. I'm lucky I could help make my daughter's dream come true. My own wish is for world enough and time that every child might have this: the chance to count some chickens before they hatch.

N
obody ever gets killed at our house,” begins a song by Charlie King, and it continues with a litany of other horrors—“no one gets shot at, run over, or stabbed, / nobody goes up in flames”—that you'd surely agree you wouldn't want to see in
your
house, either, until you realize he's discussing what routinely happens on the screen that most people happily host in their living rooms. Maybe you have one in yours, and maybe you don't, but I'm with Charlie. People very rarely get killed at our house, and I'm trying to keep it that way.

The subject isn't entirely closed, of course, because we are not
Amish. We are what you'd call a regular American family, surrounded by regular America, and I believe in raising children who express themselves freely. This they do. The other night they raised the question once again of whether it might not be time for us to join the twenty-first century and every other upright-walking family we know of, at least in this neighborhood, and get cable TV.

“Why are you asking me?” I said, pretending to be dismayed. “Do I look like the dictator of this house?”

My efforts to stall weren't fooling anybody. I am not the dictator of this house, but I am the designated philosopher-king of its television-watching habits. That is to say, when my subjects become restless on the topic of TV, as they do from time to time, I sit down once again and explain to them in the kindest of tones why it is in their best interest to drop it.

But this time I'd been blindsided. Teenager and kindergartner were in league, with perhaps even the sympathies of my husband, though he was precluded from offering an opinion by his diplomatic ties. But the indentured serfs were fomenting a small rebellion.

“OK, look,” I said to my serfs. “Watching TV takes
time
. When are you going to do it?”

They answered this without blinking: Evening. Morning. Prime time. Only when something good is on.

Which was just what I was afraid of. I explained that while I could understand there were probably some good things on TV that they were missing, they would have to miss out on
other
things in order to watch them, and when I looked around at what everybody was doing in our house, I couldn't really see what would give. I asked them, particularly my teenager (who likes to watch
Daria
and MTV at other people's houses, and whom I immediately sniffed out as our Robespierre here), to spend a few days paying careful attention to the hours of her life and exactly how she spent them. Kind of like keeping a calorie record, only with minutes. If she could come up with two expendable hours
per day, I'd consider letting her spend them with the one-eyed monster.

She agreed to this, and at that moment I knew I'd already won. Here is what she does with her time: goes to school, does homework, practices the upright bass, talks with friends on the phone, eats dinner with the family, does more homework, reads for fun, hangs out with friends at their houses or ours, works out, listens to music, jams on the electric bass, tries to form an all-girl band, maintains various pets, participates in family outings, and gets exactly enough sleep. (In summertime the routine is different but the subject is moot, because then we live beyond the reach of cables, in a tiny house with no room for a TV and antique electricity that likely wouldn't support one anyway.) Her time card, in short, is full. Friends, exercise, music—not one minute of these would she give up, nor would I want her to. Even hanging out with friends—
especially
that—should not be sacrificed for solitary confinement with a talking box. If she wants to watch MTV at a friend's house, fine, that's
their
way of socializing—at our house her pals like to beat on my conga drums. And while she might have offered to trade in some hours of math homework, she knew better. Everything else she simply likes too much to cut out of her day.

So the discussion was shelved for the time being. I intend to keep a firm hand on at least this one aspect of my kingdom. To me, that ubiquitous cable looks an awful lot like the snake that batted its eyes at Eve.

Probably I shouldn't use such a morally loaded metaphor. I don't mean to equate my freedom from TV with freedom from sin, or to suggest that it confers on me any special virtue, though others generally interpret the discussion that way. If ever it comes up in conversation that my life is largely a TV void, people instantly get defensive about their own television-viewing habits and extol the value of the
few
things they like to watch (invariably citing some
thing called the History Channel). But no defense is necessary, I promise; this is not about high-culture snobbery. If you knew me, you'd know there's almost nothing that is categorically beneath my dignity: I can get teary-eyed over a song about family reunions on the country radio station; I love to borrow my teenager's impractical shoes; on a dance floor I'm more at home with salsa and hiphop than the tango; I have been known to do the Macarena. At a party more recent than I care to admit (I was definitely past forty), my friends voted me Most Likely to Dance on the Table. Before I dig this hole any deeper, why don't you just take my word for it? I'm not too high-minded for television, I really just don't like it. It's a taste I never got to acquire, having been raised by parents who made it painfully clear that life offered no bigger waste of time than watching the “boob tube” (one of the rare slang terms that've become more apt with the years). From there I proceeded to live an adult life with lots to do and very little cash, so that purposefully setting out to pay money for a time-wasting device just never crossed my mind. I made it to the childbearing phase without TV dependence, then looked around and thought, Well gee, why start
now?
Why get a pet python on the
day
you decide to raise fuzzy little gerbils?

The advantages of raising kids without commercial TV seem obvious, and yet I know plenty of parents who express dismay as their children demand sugar-frosted sugar for breakfast, then expensive name-brand clothing, then the right to dress up as hookers not for Halloween but for school.
Hello?
Anyone who feels powerless against the screaming voice of materialistic youth culture should remember that power comes out of those two little holes in the wall. The plug is detachable. Human young are not born with the knowledge that wearing somebody's name in huge letters on a T-shirt is a thrilling privilege for which they should pay eighty dollars. It takes years of careful instruction to arrive at that piece of logic.

I ask my kids, on principle, to live without wasteful and preposterous things (e.g., clothing that extorts from customers the right to wear labels on the outside), and it's a happier proposition to follow through if we don't have an extra blabbermouth in the room telling them every fourteen minutes about six brand-
new
wasteful, preposterous things they'll die without. It's fairly well documented that TV creates a net loss in contentment. The average household consumption of goods and services has doubled since 1957, when TV began to enter private homes, but according to a University of Chicago study, over all those years the fraction of Americans who describe themselves as “very happy” has remained steady, at about one third. The amount of money people believed they
needed
to buy happiness actually doubled between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s, and the figure is still reaching for the sky. Think the kids would be unhappy without TV? I say pull the plug, quick, before they get more miserable. My daughters are by no means immune to peer pressure, but the kindergartner couldn't pick Tommy Hilfiger out of a lineup, and the ninth grader dresses way cool on an impressively frugal clothing budget, and they both find a hundred things to do each day that are more fun than sitting in front of a box. They agree with me about TV, once they're forced to accept the theory that there are only twenty-four hours in a day.

I can't think how anyone, child or adult, could sit still for the daily three hours and forty-six minutes that is our national TV-watching average. For my own purposes, sitting still is probably the most difficult part of the proposition. I have struggled all my life with a constitutional impatience with anything that threatens to waste what's left of my minutes here on earth. I start fidgeting at any community meeting where the first item on the agenda is to discuss and vote on the order of the other items on the agenda; I have to do discreet yoga relaxation postures in my chair to keep myself from hollering, “Yo, people, life is short!” I was born like
this; I need to get a move on. I'm the kind of person who races around the kitchen so fast while cooking (with my mind on two other things), that I sometimes snag the fabric of my pants pocket on a drawer knob, and may either rip my trousers or fling the forks and spoons across the room. But reading can hold me spellbound, provided I'm the one turning the pages. And so I'm the kind of person who would rather
read
history (skipping over the parts I don't need) than have to sit and
watch
the eight-hour docudrama (baloney included). As a habitual reader I find the pace of information delivery on television noticeably sluggish. There's a perfectly good reason for this: The script for a one-hour TV documentary is only about fifteen or twenty double-spaced pages in length, whereas most any competent reader can cover three to five times that much material in an hour. Devoted as our culture is to efficiency, convenience, and DSL Internet access, I'm surprised so many Americans are content to get their up-to-the-minute news delivered in such a slow, vacuum-packed format.

I did get a chance, recently, to watch CNN for a few minutes, and I was bedazzled by what I presume to be its post–September 11 format, in which the main story is at the top of the screen, “Coming Up Next” occupies the middle, and completely unrelated headlines run constantly across the bottom. Yikes. It looked to me like a TV trying very hard to be a newspaper, about as successfully as my five-year-old imitates her big sister's smooth teenage dance steps. Ten minutes of that visual three-ring circus gave me a headache; when I want
newspaper,
I'll read one.

It's true that being a reader rather than a viewer gives me a type of naïveté that amuses my friends. I'm in the dark, for instance, about what many public figures look like, at least in color rather than newsprint (for the longest time I thought Phil Donahue was
blond
), and in some cases I may not know quite how to pronounce their names. When people began talking about the dreadful anthrax attack on the congressional offices, I kept scratching my
head and asking, “
Dashell?
There's a Senator
Dashell?
” It took me nearly a day to identify the man whose name my brain had been registering as something like “Dask-lee.”

But I don't mind being somebody's fool. I don't think I'm missing too much. Of course, every two weeks or so someone will tell me about the latest should-be-required-viewing-for-the-human-race documentary that I've missed. No problem: I know how to send off for it, usually from Annenberg CPB. Then some winter evening I'll put the tape in the machine, and if I agree it's wonderful I will see it out. Often it turns out I've long since read an article that told me exactly the same things about Muslim women or Mongolian mummies unearthed or whatever-have-you, or a book that told me more. For bringing events quickly to the world, the imaginative reporter's pad and the still photographer's snap are far more streamlined instruments than bulky video cameras and production committees. But sometimes, I won't deny it, there is a video image that stops me cold and rearranges the furniture of my heart. An African mother's gesture of resignation, the throat-singing of a Tuva shepherd, a silent pan of the untouched horizon of a Central Asian steppe—these things can carry an economy of feeling in so many unspoken words that they're pure instruction for a wordy novelist. For exactly this reason I love to watch movies, domestic and especially foreign ones, and we see lots of them at home. We do own a VCR. My kids would point out to you that it's old and somewhat antiquated; I would point out that so am I, by some standards, but we both still work just fine.

I'm happy to use the machine; I just don't want a cable or a dish or an antenna. Having a sieve up there on the roof collecting wild beams from everywhere does seem poetic, but the image that strikes me as more realistic is that of a faucet into the house that runs about 5 percent clear water and 95 percent raw sewage. I know some people who stay on guard all the time and carefully manage this flow so their household gets a healthy intake; I know
a lot more who don't. Call me a control freak, but I have this thing about my household appliances—blender, lawn mower, TV monitor—which is that I like to feel I am in charge of the machine, and not vice versa. I have gotten so accustomed to this balance of power with my VCR that I behave embarrassingly in front of real television. When I watch those stony-faced men (I swear one of them is named Stone) deliver the official news with their pursed mouths and woeful countenances, I feel compelled to mutter back at them, insolently, while my teenager puts her forearms over her face. (Now you know what I really am—more insolent than my own teenager.) “You're completely ignoring what
caused
this,” I mumble at Ted-Peter-Dan, “and anyway who did your
hair?
”