What's Missing in Kingsolver's Animal Vegetable and Miracle?

This week I got into Barbara Kingsolver’s "Animal Vegetable and Miracle", a book about , among other things, feeding yourself from locally produced goods, using just what is in season or that you have preserved for overwintering to get you to the next productive season.

Haven’t read very far yet– just through Waiting for Asparagus but already the red "Uh,oh" flags are flying, and I’ve got to speak up.

Toward the end of that chapter, the family of four decides to embark on their year of eating locally produced foods, and sit around near the end of April making a shopping list. Lamenting at the skimpy choices they anticipate they will have, they then go to the local farmer’s market to put together their ingredient list out of which they will make their breakfast, lunches and dinners for that week.

Surprisingly, they do pretty well - turkey sausages, baby lettuces, hulled walnuts, honey, even down to fresh rhubarb stalks to substitute for fruit early in the season. In return for all this, they part with a significant amount of money.. For you see, they are equating feeding themselves with buying stuff.

The problem is that they are starting later than they have to, and are overlooking a wealth of vegetables that are locally grown, organic and free. They tickle with the edges of it by watching for the wild asparagus, as well as that growing in their own garden, but in combing the greenery for asparagus stalks, they are passing by a ton of equally delicious and nutrient-dense vegetables that are growing voluntarily right under foot.

In SW Virginia, by early March there will be still root crops such as dandelion, burdock, yellow dock and cattail, as well as duck potato and daylily tubers. By later in March to early April, we’re looking at young dandelion greens (which sometimes are available at the farmers markets) wild onions and garlic, chickweed, ground ivy, young garlic mustard, young violets, daylily shoots, and a range of young wild lettuces and other composites that go great in salads. These not only provide fresh greens, but are so rich nutritionally that they both drive out the toxins built up over winter as well as replenish stored nutrients depleted through the winter months.

This is a great failing of Slow Food USA, and to a lesser extent SFI. They give lip service to foraging, and provide a forum for discussing it that are well attended at Terra Madre conferences, especially by the First Nation delegates , and some of the elitist chef’s who subscribe to SF principles forage or buy wild ingredients for their menus, but it is treated as an afterthought, not a mainstream topic for consideration. There is far too much emphasis on things you have to plant and grow, and then buy from farmers, and far too little on things that grow in everybody’s yard voluntarily that you just have to stoop down and harvest.

This will be a year to move these elements to the forefront, along with the practitioners of the culinary wild food arts who teach it around the world. Watch for more.