262 animal, vegetable, miracle
wouldn’t be able to convene on the actual day. Turkeys galore were now
wedged into our freezer, postharvest, but today’s family gathering included
some vegetarians who would not enjoy a big dead bird on the table, how-
ever happily it might have lived its life. Meatless cooking is normal to me;
I was glad to make a vegetarian feast. But today, as hostess, I felt oddly
pressed by tradition to have some kind of large, autumnally harvested be-
ing, not just ingredients, as the centerpiece for our meal. A hearty pump-
kin soup baked in its own gorgeous body would be just the thing for a
turkeyless Thanksgiving.
Or so I’d thought, before I knew this one would not go gentle into that
good night (as Dylan Thomas advised). Even our meanest roosters hadn’t
raged this hard against the dying of the light. At length, Dad and I ascer-
tained the problem was our Queensland Blue, which was almost solid
fl esh, lacking the large open cavity in its center that makes the standard
jack-o’-lantern relatively easy to open up. We finally performed something
Trading Fair and Square
The local food movement addresses many important, interconnected food
issues, including environmental responsibility, agricultural sustainability, and fair
wages to those who grow our food. Buying directly from small farmers serves all
these purposes, but what about things like our pumpkin pie spices, or our cof-
fee, that don’t grow where we live?
We can apply most of the same positive food standards, minus the local con-
nection, to some imported products. Coffee, tea, and spices are grown in envi-
ronmentally responsible ways by some small- scale growers, mostly in the
developing world. We can encourage these good practices by offering a fair
wage for their efforts. This approach, termed fair trade, has grown into an im-
pressive international effort to counter the growing exploitation of farmers in
these same countries. Consumer support for conscientious small growers helps
counter the corporate advantage, and sustains their livelihoods, environments,
and communities.
Coffee is an example of how fair trade can work to the advantage of the
grower, consumer, and environment. As an understory plant, coffee was tradi-
tionally grown under a shaded mixture of fruit, nut, and timber trees. Large- scale
modern production turned it into a monoculture, replacing wild forests with