Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

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what we had done: a purification ritual, to cultivate health and gratitude.
It sounds so much better than wackadoo.
Over the years since I first acquired children and a job, I’ve often made
reference to the concern of “keeping my family fed.” I meant this in the
same symbolic way I’d previously used (pre- kids, pre- respectable job) to
speak of something “costing a lot of bread.” I was really talking about
money. Now when I say bread, I mean bread. I find that food is not sym-
bolic of anything so much as it is real stuff: beetroot as neighbor to my
shoe, chicken as sometime companion. I once read a pioneer diary in
which the Kansas wife postponed, week after week, harvesting the last
hen in her barren, windy yard. “We need the food badly,” she wrote, “but I
will miss the company.”
I have never been anywhere near that lonely, but now I can relate to
the relationship. When I pick apples, I miss the way they looked on the
tree. Eggplants look like lightbulbs on the plant, especially the white and

But most of the world’s malnourished children live in countries that already

produce surplus food. We have no reason to believe they would have better ac-

cess to this special new grain. Golden rice is one more attempt at a monoculture

solution to nutritional problems that have been caused by monocultures and

disappearing diversity. In India alone, farmers have traditionally grown over 200

types of greens, and gathered many more wild ones from the countryside. Every

single one is a good source of beta- carotene. So are fruits and vegetables. Fur-

ther, vitamin A delivered in a rice kernel may not even help a malnourished child,

because it can’t be absorbed well in isolation from other nutrients. Throwing

more rice at the problem of disappearing dietary diversity is a blind approach to

the problem of blindness. “Naïve” might describe a person who believes agri-

businesses develop their heavily patented commodity crops in order to feed the

poor. (Golden rice, alone, has seventy patents on it.) Technicolor chard and its

relatives growing in village gardens—that’s a solution for realists.

STEVEN L. HOPP