I think “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” has been the best book by far that I have read this year. It really is too much for me to digest if I try to read more than one chapter at a time. Here is an excerpt from the chapter I read today:
I understand that most U.S. Citizens don’t have room in there lives to grow food or even see it growing. But I have trouble accepting the next step in our journey toward obligate symbiosis with the packaged meal and takeout. Cooking is a dying art in our culture. Why is a good question, and an uneasy one, because I find myself politically and socioeconomoically entangled in the answer. I belong to the generation of women who took as our youthful rallying cry: Allow us a good education so we won’t have to slave in the kitchen. We recoiled from the proposition that keeping a husband presentable and fed should be our highest intellectual aspiration. We fought for entry as equal partners into every quarter of the labor force. We went to school, sweated those exams, earned our professional stripes, and we beg therefore to be excused from manual labor. Or else our fulltime job is manual labor, we are carpenters or steelworkers, or we stand at a cash register all day. At the end of our shift we deserve to go home and put our feet up. Somehow, though, history came around and bit us in the backside: now most women have jobs and still find themselves largely in charge of the housework. Cooking at the end of a long day is a burden we could live without.
It’s a reasonable position. But it got twisted into a pathological food culture. When my generation of women walked away from the kitchen we were escorted down that path by a profiteering industry that knew a tired, vulnerable marketing target when they saw it. “Hey, ladies,” it said to us, “go ahead, get liberated. We’ll take care of dinner.” They threw open the door and we walked into a nutritional crisis and genuinely toxic food supply. If you think toxic is an exaggeration, read the package directions for handling raw chicken from a CAFO. We came a long way, baby, into bad eatting habits and collaterally impaired family dynamics. No matter what else we do or believe, food remains at the center of every culture. Ours now runs on empty calories. Pg 126
This passage brings up all kinds of questions to me. There are the validity questions such as, “Are wild range chicken labels really significantly different from CAFO chicken?” And then also questions such as, “Is this a good valid explanation of the results of feminism?” “What possible answers exist to this developing family crisis?” ”How can we provide healthy living (family and food) in our both-parents-working culture?”
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