210 animal, vegetable, miracle
petbaggers of the reconstruction era were not the first or the last oppor-
tunists to capitalize on an extractive economy. When urban-headquartered
companies come to the country with a big plan—whether their game is
coal, timber, or industrial agriculture—the plan is to take out the good
stuff, ship it to the population centers, make a fortune, and leave behind
a mess.
Given this history, one might expect the so-called Red States to vote
consistently for candidates supporting working- class values. In fact, our
nation in almost every region is divided in a near dead heat between two
parties that apparently don’t distinguish themselves clearly along class
lines. If every state were visually represented with the exact blend of red
and blue it earned in recent elections, we’d have ourselves a big purple
country. The tidy divide is a media just- so story.
Our uneasy relationship between heartland and coasts, farm and fac-
tory, country and town, is certainly real. But it is both more rudimentary
and more subtle than most political analysts make it out to be. It’s about
loyalties, perceived communities, and the things each side understands
to be important because of the ground, literally, upon which we stand.
Wendell Berry summed it up much better than “blue and red” in one line
of dialogue from his novel Jayber Crow, which is peopled by farmers strug-
gling to survive on what the modern, mostly urban market will pay for
food. After watching nearly all the farms in the county go bankrupt, one
of these men comments: “I’ve wished sometimes that the sons of bitches
would starve. And now I’m getting afraid they actually will.”
/
In high summer, about the time I was seeing red in my kitchen, the
same thing was happening to some of our county’s tomato farmers. They
had learned organic methods, put away the chemicals, and done every-
thing right to grow a product consumers claimed to want. They’d waited
the three years for certifi cation. They’d watered, weeded, and picked,
they’d sorted the round from the misshapen, producing the perfect or-
ganic tomatoes ordered by grocery chains. And then suddenly, when the
farmers were finally bringing in these tomatoes by the truckload and hop-
ing for a decent payout, some grocery buyers backtracked. “Not this