I heard award-winning writer Barbara Kingsolver being interviewed on the radio this afternoon. She was touting her and her family’s experiences raising their own food for a year and characterized it as the normal condition of the human species.
That’s a ridiculous assertion. Individual families raising all of their own food is no more normal for human beings than our present, more specialized economic habit is. Humans living in settled communities and practicing sedentary subsistence agriculture is sometimes referred to as the “Neolithic Revolution” and it began about 10,000 years ago. The human species is probably at least 250,000 years old. Prior to 10,000 years ago as best we know we lived in small nomadic or semi-nomadic communities and were primarily hunter-gatherers, occasionally scattering a few seeds around and coming back after the plants had matured to harvest the results. The notion that we were agricultural for most of our history as a species is absurd.
I don’t object to Ms. Kingsolver conducting experiments in romanticized subsistence agriculture and making money by writing about it and selling the books to people thousands of miles away, a practice little different IMO from eating food raised by people thousands of miles away. I do object to her disguising what she’s doing as virtuous. Trade with people far away has saved, literally, millions of lives. If we all carried out these fantasies of self-sufficiency most of humanity would starve to death.
If there is a normal condition of human beings it consists of few of us living to see our tenth birthday, a substantial number of women dying before their thirtieth birthdays as a consequence of childbirth, and many of the rest of us dying of disease or infection before age fifty. For some reason or other I can’t get terribly nostalgic about that.
While they were growing their own food I suspect that Ms. Kingsolver and her family used steel tools which, if they were old enough might have been made in the United States, ate from glazed pottery plates made in China, drove a car to the farmers market that might well have been made in Japan or Germany, and visited a doctor every now and again whom they paid with U. S. greenbacks or a check on a bank 3,000 miles away or billed to an insurance company 1,500 miles away.
Trade is good.
I’m with you. If we’re getting back to basics, let’s get back to eating ants, lice picked from each others’ hair, and the grubs we find under rocks.
Just try to get a good grub-hunting party going nowadays.
The author moved from Tucson for the experiment — that should at least give notice to some of the implications.
Wow, it’s rare to see such a cranky and unfair post coming from you.
First, any charitable reading of Kingsolver’s statement would acknowledge that she’s probably referring to the period of recorded human history. Since the advent of agriculture predated recorded history, in historical terms growing one’s own food is indeed the norm.
Second, where exactly does Kingsolver argue that trade, even international trade, is bad? She does claim implicitly that our current volume of trade is unsustainable, which given current technology and environmental concerns is true. There’s a limited amount of oil left to harvest; once it peaks, we’re going to have to come up with other transportation methods or start growing our own food in a hurry. From both an environmental and and economic standpoint, it makes sense for our society to be ready for that eventuality.
She’s not calling for an end to trade in food; she even opposes our current grain subsidies, which are an obstacle to free trade. She goes far, to my mind, in refusing to buy bananas, but isn’t calling for any kind of quota or ban on imported goods. I don’t deny that some local food types do make such a call, but they’re in the minority and they’re in the wrong.
Finally, the claim that working the land is virtuous is very old and very cultural; Kingsolver didn’t make it up. It’s a claim that people in America have made ever since there was an America, and before.
As for PD’s point, and speaking as a resident of Tucson: the Kingsolvers were canaries in the coal mine. Tucson and (especially) Phoenix are going to have a hard time sustaining their historical growth. Water is a BIG problem here, and the rising price of energy is making it worse.
Maxwell James:
What Ms. Kingsolver said, verbatim, was that growing one’s own food was the normal condition of the human species. She didn’t qualify it in any way. That’s poppycock.
I haven’t read her book so maybe that’s not what she meant. But it is what she said and that’s what I was reacting to.
And she was arguing specifically for food self-sufficiency. Food constitutes an enormous proportion of all world trade and, for many countries, it’s their only source of foreign exchange. No food trade no trade, period.
That’s a formula for disaster.
We’ve known for the last 300 years that specialization was the key to efficiency and prosperity.
And I didn’t criticize her for saying that working the land was virtuous. I criticized her for saying that food self-sufficiency was virtuous.
Not having heard the interview, and being unable to find it online, I’ll submit to your interpretation. But based on what I’ve read in her book and elsewhere, I don’t think Kingsolver is an absolutist when it comes to trade or self-sufficiency. She is a big booster of self-sufficiency on the community scale, but acknowledges there are limits to this.
Self-sufficiency is not an absolute; one can have more or less of it. Same with specialization – it’s great up until a point, but endless specialization is worthless. It leads to products for which there is only one customer.
Given the concerns over our energy sources and the environment, I think it is reasonable to argue that we should have more self-sufficiency, at least on a community scale, at least when it comes to daily necessities such as food and water. You yourself have pointed out many times that we’re not going to come up with a magical new energy source anytime soon, and our reserves of oil are not limitless. As prices continue to go up, the incentives for self-sufficiency on a community scale become greater and greater. It may or may not be virtuous, but at some point it is simply realistic.