A Fruit in Vegetable Clothing and other Mysteries

A selection of Heirloom Tomatoes

“A book is a garden carried in the pocket.”
- Proverb, (Arabian or Chinese, depending on where you look)

I have a nightstand full of books. They are stacked precariously like the tea cups on the Mad Hatter’s tea table. It’s not that I don’t have bookshelves, but these are books that can’t be put away, not just yet. These are books I’m in the middle of, books I intend to read and books I have read and mean to put away, but just can’t. In the latter group is one by Barbara Kingsolver entitled Animal, Vegetable, Miracle . It is on my nightstand for a reason.

If there is anything that will put me to sleep faster than a non-fiction book, it is a non-fiction book about healthy eating. In fact, the only thing that will put me to sleep faster than either of those is a book about how we are all wrecking the earth one plastic cup at a time. “They” have a point, I explained very responsibly to my fourteen year old, as I tossed out the styrofoam dinner plates. If we aren’t careful, global warming will kill us all.

Or at least, I told him, it will kill you. Just before the asteroids hit. Or the sun implodes. Of course you won’t know about the sun imploding until about eight minutes after the earth is incinerated, but that is a whole other blog.

So Animal, Vegetable, Miracle has been on my nightstand for a couple of years, waiting for that one special after ten, where no amount of indie music filtering through the Nano or infomercials beaming into the bed can bring on the night.

A few weeks ago, restless and cranky, I picked up my secret-weapon-against-insomnia book and started turning the pages. I knew the minute I read the word “locavore," that I would be snoring loudly, long before Letterman's Top Ten.

Turns out Animal, Vegetable, Miracle not only did not put me to sleep, 12 fruit trees and a backyard garden later, it is still on my nightstand, this time right at the top of the rickety stack. Who knew tomatoes were fruit? (only thought of as vegetables because the Supreme Court ruled them a vegetable and therefore subject to tax back in the 1800’s). Who knew that your Thanksgiving turkey has been selectively bred into a bird unable to reproduce the way nature intended and to have a breast so heavy that it would be unable to stand even if it were to survive beyond the five month slaughtering point? Who knew that vegetables and fruits in the supermarket are genetically engineered, not for flavor, but first for resistance to disease, then for imperishability and lastly for good looks? Who knew that Kiwi’s have a season? Well they do, and unless you live in the tropics or New Zealand, they don’t have a season in your area. When you eat them you may as well imagine the 10 gallons of smoking, choking diesel it took to get each one to your table. Talk about your carbon footprints! I feel better about my plastic cups. Ok, not really.

But this isn’t a book about guilt and cocktail party killing lines. Kingsolver took on a personal challenge, just to see if it could be done. She and her family chronicled their attempt to eat locally for a year on produce and livestock they either raised and harvested or slaughtered themselves or that they could obtain from roughly 100 miles around them.



Should we all do that? Can we all do that? Can we eat what is in season and grown locally and not succumb to the Columbian banana in Chicago or the Chilean seedless grapes in Fort Lauderdale? Probably not. But if the president’s wife can plant a vegetable garden in the backyard of the White House, I can probably grow a tomato or two in my backyard, and that’s a start.

If nothing else, after reading Kingsolver’s book I decided I wanted to water something I can eat! And, if the trees and garden yield as much as I think they will, let’s hope that what ever I’m watering back there, the neighbors will want to eat too. Otherwise some of you will be getting packages of produce for Christmas. Just sayin…


Barbados Cherry like the one in my backyard now