208 a n i m a l , v e g e ta b l e , m i r ac l e in my psyche, even while living in some of the world’s major cities It’s probably this dual citizenship that has sensitized me to my nation’s urbanrural antipathy, and how it affects people in both camps Rural concerns are less covered by the mainstream media, and often considered intrinsically comic Corruption in city governments is reported as grim news everywhere; from small towns (or Tennessee) it is fodder for talk-show jokes Thomas Hardy wrote about the sort of people who milked cows, but writers who so in the modern era will be dismissed as marginal The policy of our nation is made in cities, controlled largely by urban voters who aren’t well informed about the changes on the face of our land, and the men and women who work it Those changes can be mapped on worry lines: as the years have gone by, as farms have gone out of business, America has given an ever-smaller cut of each food dollar (now less than 19 percent) to its farmers The psychic divide between rural and urban people is surely a part of the problem “Eaters must understand,” Wendell Berry writes, “that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act, and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used.” Eaters must, he claims, but it sure looks like most eaters don’t If they did, how would we frame the sentence suggested by today’s foodbuying habits, directed toward today’s farmers? “Let them eat dirt” is hardly overstating it The urban U.S middle class appears more specifically concerned about exploited Asian factory workers Symptomatic of this rural-urban identity crisis is our eager embrace of a recently imposed divide: the Red States and the Blue States That color map comes to us with the suggestion that both coasts are populated by educated civil libertarians, while the vast middle and south are crisscrossed with the studded tracks of ATVs leaving a trail of flying beer cans and rebel yells Okay, I’m exaggerating a little But I certainly sense a bit of that when urban friends ask me how I can stand living here, “so far from everything?” (When I hear this question over the phone, I’m usually looking out the window at a forest, a running creek, and a vegetable garden, thinking: Define everything.) Otherwise sensitive coastal-dwelling folk may refer to the whole chunk of our continent lying between the Cascades and the Hudson River as “the Interior.” I gather this is now a com- l i f e i n a r e d s tat e 209 mon designation It’s hard for me to see the usefulness of lumping Minneapolis, Atlanta, my little hometown in Kentucky, Yellowstone Park, and so forth, into a single category that does not include New York and California “Going into the Interior” sounds like an endeavor that might require machetes to hack through the tangled vines In fact, the politics of rural regions are no more predictable than those in cities “Conservative” is a reasonable position for a farmer who can lose home and livelihood all in one year by taking a risk on a new crop But that’s conservative as in, “eager to conserve what we have, reluctant to change the rules overnight,” and unrelated to how the term is currently (often incomprehensibly) applied in party politics The farm county where I grew up had so few Republicans, they all registered Democrat so they could vote in the only local primary My earliest understanding of radical, class-conscious politics came from miners’ strikes in one of the most rural parts of my state, and of our nation The only useful generalization I’d hazard about rural politics is that they tend to break on the line of “insider” vs “outsider.” When my country neighbors sit down with a new social group, the first question they ask one another is not “What you do?” but rather, “Who are your people?” Commonly we will spend more than the first ten minutes of a new acquaintance tracing how our families might be related If not by blood, then by marriage Failing that, by identifying someone significant we have known in common Only after this ritual of familial placing does the conversation comfortably move on to other subjects I am blessed with an ancestor who was the physician in this county from about 1910 into the 1940s From older people I’ll often hear of some memorably dire birth or farm accident to which my great-uncle was called; lucky for me he was skilled and Hippocratic But even a criminal ancestor will get you insider status, among the forgiving Not so lucky are those who move here with no identifiable family ties Such a dark horse is likely to remain “the new fellow” for the rest of his natural life, even if he arrived in his prime and lives to be a hundred The country tradition of mistrusting outsiders may be unfairly applied, but it’s not hard to understand For much of U.S history, rural regions have been treated essentially as colonial property of the cities The car- 210 a n i m a l , v e g e ta b l e , m i r ac l e petbaggers of the reconstruction era were not the first or the last opportunists 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 factory, 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 struggling 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 everything right to grow a product consumers claimed to want They’d waited the three years for certification They’d watered, weeded, and picked, they’d sorted the round from the misshapen, producing the perfect organic tomatoes ordered by grocery chains And then suddenly, when the farmers were finally bringing in these tomatoes by the truckload and hoping for a decent payout, some grocery buyers backtracked “Not this l i f e i n a r e d s tat e 211 week,” one store offered without warning, and then another Not the next week either, nor the next A tomato is not a thing that can be put on hold Mountains of ripe fruits piled up behind the packing house and turned to orange sludge, swarming with clouds of fruit flies These tomatoes were perfect, and buyers were hungry Agreements had been made But pallets of organic tomatoes from California had begun coming in just a few dollars cheaper It’s hard to believe, given the amount of truck fuel involved, but transportation is tax-deductible for the corporations, so we taxpayers paid for that shipping The California growers only needed the economics of scale on their side, a cheap army of pickers, and customers who would reliably opt for the lower price As simply as that, a year of planning and family labor turned to red mush Our growers had been warned that this could happen—market buyers generally don’t sign a binding contract So the farmers took a risk, and took a loss Some of them will try again next year, though they will likely hedge their bets with Delicata squash and peas as well Courage, practicality, and making the best of a bad situation are much of what farming is about Before the tomatoes all rotted away, Appalachian Harvest found a way to donate and distribute the enormous excess of unpurchased produce to needy families The poor of our county were rich in tomatoes that summer “We were glad we could give it away,” one of the farmers told me “We like to be generous and help others, that’s fine, that’s who we are But a lot of us are barely making ends meet, ourselves It seems like it’s always the people that have the least who end up giving the most Why is that?” In Charlottesville, Asheville, Roanoke, and Knoxville, supermarket shoppers had no way of knowing how much heartache and betrayal might be wrapped up in those cellophane two-packs of California tomatoes Maybe they noticed the other tomatoes were missing this week, those local ones with the “Healthy Farms, Close to Home” label Or maybe they just saw “organic tomatoes,” picked them up, and dropped them into their carts on top of the cereal boxes and paper towels Eaters must understand, how we eat determines how the world is used They will or they won’t And the happy grocery store music plays on Canning Season by camille / When I was a kid, summer was as long as a lifetime A month could pass without me ever knowing what day of the week it was Time seemed to stretch into one gigantic, lazy day of blackberry picking and crawdad hunting My friends and I would pretty much spend our lives together, migrating back and forth between the town swimming pool and the woods, where we would pretend to be orphans left to our own devices in the wilderness School was not on our minds Our world was green grass, sunshine, and imagination Then August would roll around: a tragedy every time “Already? How can this be?” I would ask, shattered by the terrible truth that I needed a three-ring binder and some #2 pencils It’s not that school was a bad thing Summer was just so much better August is rarely announced to kids by a calendar For some of my friends it was the shiny floors and fluorescent lights of the department stores with their back-to-school sales that brought the message For me it was the bubbling canning bath and the smell of tomatoes In my family the end of summer means the drone of our food-dehydrator is background music, and you can’t open the fridge without huge lumpy bags of produce falling out and clobbering your feet Every spare half-hour goes into cutting up something to be preserved: the beans and corn to be blanched and frozen, the cucumbers sliced and pickled, the squash frozen or dehydrated or pawned off on a friend And then there are the tomatoes Pounds of them roll down from the garden each day, staining every one of our kitchen towels with their crimson juices We slice little ones by the hundred and lay them out on the stackable trays of our food-drier We can the medium-sized ones, listening afterward for each “ping” that tells us the jar lid has properly sealed The rest go into big, bubbling pots of tomato sauce I’m sure this sounds like a hassle and mess to those who have never ... and took a loss Some of them will try again next year, though they will likely hedge their bets with Delicata squash and peas as well Courage, practicality, and making the best of a bad situation... situation are much of what farming is about Before the tomatoes all rotted away, Appalachian Harvest found a way to donate and distribute the enormous excess of unpurchased produce to needy families... as that, a year of planning and family labor turned to red mush Our growers had been warned that this could happen—market buyers generally don’t sign a binding contract So the farmers took a risk,