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d325438
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Our journey was to be a great enterprise of balance. My father, of course, was bringing the Word of God--which fortunately weighs nothing at all.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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f87a30c
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Both vitamin pills and vegetables are loaded with essential nutrients, but not in the same combinations. Spinach is a good source of both vitamin C and iron. As it happens, vitamin C boosts iron absorption, allowing the body to take in more of it than if the mineral were introduced alone. When I first started studying nutrition, I became fascinated with these coincidences, realizing of course they're not coincidences. Human bodies and their..
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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6e71907
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The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. What I want is almost so simple I can't say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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69ca8e0
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south, moving slowly. It looked something like a huge blue-gray shower curtain being drawn along by the hand of God. You could just barely see through it, enough to make
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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4213215
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Our culture is not unacquainted with the idea of food as a spiritually loaded commodity. We're just particular about which spiritual arguments we'll accept as valid for declining certain foods. Generally unacceptable reasons: environmental destruction, energy waste, the poisoning of workers. Acceptable: it's prohibited by a holy text. Set down a platter of country ham in front of a rabbi, an imam, and a Buddhist monk, and you may have just ..
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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51d7553
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Eating is a genuine need, continuous from our first day to our last, amounting over time to our most significant statement of what we are made of and what we have chosen to make of our connection to home ground.
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earth
sustainable
ethics
eating
food
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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33c8a83
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One day we came home from some errands to find a grocery sack of them hanging on our mailbox. The perpetrator, of course, was nowhere in sight. "Wow," we all said--"what a good idea!" Garrison Keillor says July is the only time of year when country people lock our cars in the church parking lot, so people won't put squash on the front seat. I used to think that was a joke."
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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4a1e8c5
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The rule of fishes is the same as the rule of people: if the shark comes, they will all escape, and leave you to be eaten. They share a single jumpy heart that drives them to move all together, running away from danger just before it arrives. Somehow they know. Underneath
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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1821941
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There is no point in treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad...Sadness is more or less like a head cold -- with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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7ae8125
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I shrugged. "I saw a Star Trek episode one time that was along those lines. All the women on this whole planet end up naked. I can't remember exactly, but I think Captain Kirk gets turned into a pipe wrench."
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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99cabd7
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The larger the corporation, the more distant its motives are apt to be from the original spirit of organic farming--and the farther the products will likely be shipped to buyers who will smile at the happy farm picture on the package, and never be the wiser.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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b7d6689
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We're genetically predisposed toward certain behaviors that we've collectively decided are unhelpful; adultery and racism are possible examples. With reasonable success, we mitigate those impulses through civil codes, religious rituals, maternal warnings--the whole bag of tricks we call culture.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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4b5d5dc
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But a spontaneous traveler inevitably will end up with the tummy gauge suddenly on empty, in some place where cuisine is not really the point: a museum cafeteria, or late-night snack bar across from the concert hall. Eating establishments where cuisine isn't the point--is that a strange notion?
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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14a8d3a
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Finally, cooking is good citizenship. It's the only way to get serious about putting locally raised foods into your diet, which keeps farmlands healthy and grocery money in the neighborhood.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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795d535
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Arterial-plaque specials that save minutes now can cost years, later on.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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00cc584
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She never says gracias because life is made of survival not grace, she says, and servants are paid to bring what they're asked.
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gracias
thanks
grace
survival
servants
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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4077400
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Many other raw food products--notably poultry from CAFOs--typically carry a much higher threat to human health in terms of pathogen load, and yet the government trusts us to render it safe in our own humble kitchens. But it's easy to see how impossibly strict milk rules might gratify industry lobbyists, by eliminating competition from family producers.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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e39f0a1
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The difference is an objective phenomenon of soil science; what we call "soil" is a community of living, mostly microscopic organisms in a nutrient matrix. Organic farming, by definition, enhances the soil's living and nonliving components. Modern conventional farming is an efficient reduction of that process that adds back just a few crucial nutrients of the many that are removed each year when biomass is harvested ... Chemicals that steri..
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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956d1cf
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Don't you miss it, any of it?' ... 'I couldn't say.' She thought about it. 'Not cars or electric lights, not movies. Books I can get if I ask. But walking around in a library, putting my hands on books I never knew about, that I miss. Any thing else, I don't know.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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8fe42a1
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I tried to recall where I had been at sunup that day. It was in St. Louis, Missouri, where they have that giant McDonald's thing towering over the city,
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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ccc4b02
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For a long time he frowned at the brick path that lay between himself and the bird, and then he let go of the wall. He took one step and then more, buoyed up by some impossible antigravity. After two steps the hummingbird was gone, but Nicholas still headed for the air it had occupied, his hands grasping at vapour. It was as if an invisible balloon floated above him, tied to his overall strap, dragging him along from above. He swayed and sw..
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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f77e232
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What other man, ever again, would just do as she commanded, no questions asked? She felt overwhelmed with love and loss and nostalgia for this bond that was not even yet in her past,
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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44b6a68
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Our bodies aren't adapted to absorb big loads of nutrients all at once (many supplements surpass RDA values by 200 percent or more), but tiny quantities of them in combinations--exactly as they occur in plants. Eating a wide variety of different plant chemicals is a very good idea, according to research from the American Society for Nutritional Sciences. You don't have to be a chemist, but color vision helps. By eating plant foods in all di..
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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2b0bbbd
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Most people no longer believe that buying sneakers made in Asian sweatshops is a kindness to those child laborers. Farming is similar. In every country on earth, the most human scenario for farmers is likely to be feeding those who live nearby--if international markets would allow them to do it. Food transport has become a bizarre and profitable economic equation that's no longer really about feeding anyone ... If you care about farmers, le..
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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ad3a31c
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from an excerpt by her daughter Camille] Living on the land that has grown my food gives me a sense of security I'm lucky to have. Feeling safe isn't so easy for people my age, who face odious threats like global warming, overpopulation, and chemical warfare in our future. But even as the world runs out of fuel and the ice caps melt, I will know the real sources of my sustenance. My college education may or may not land me a good job down t..
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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1f7084a
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Sylvain] told us that in India it's sometimes considered a purification ritual to go home and spend a year eating everything from one place--ideally, even to grow it yourself. I liked this name for what we had done: a purification ritual, to cultivate health and gratitude. It sounds so much better than wackadoo.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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0f12047
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Our gardening forebears meant watermelon to be the juicy, barefoot taste of a hot summer's end, just as a pumpkin is the trademark fruit of late October. Most of us accept the latter, and limit our jack-o'-latern activities to the proper botanical season. Waiting for a watermelon is harder. It's tempting to reach for melons, red peppers, tomatoes, and other late-summer delights before the summer even arrives. But it's actually possible to w..
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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8f173b8
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It's the worst of bad manners to ridicule the small gesture...Small, stepwise changes in personal habits aren't trivial. Ultimately they will, or won't, add up to having been the thing that mattered.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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dc0aebe
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Everything, she wanted to scream at him, was a question of safety. All human endeavor bent itself to the same lost cause. Being kept inside a pumpkin shell your whole life was no guarantee against getting flung into space.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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2dc9834
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A life was a life. She'd been orphaned at an age to internalize death as poor material for a joke. And likewise, salvation.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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143ce02
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A hundred different paths may lighten the world's load of suffering. Giving up meat is one path; giving up bananas is another. The more we know about our food system, the more we are called into complex choices. It seems facile to declare one single forbidden fruit, when humans live under so many different kinds of trees.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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28d35d8
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When I want to take God at his word exactly, I take a peep out the window at His Creation. Because that, darling, He makes fresh for us every day, without a lot of dubious middle managers.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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9b7212c
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A taste for better stuff is cultivated only through experience.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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c1b3b51
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This is why we do it all over again every year. Fueled only by the stuff they drink from the air and earth, the bush beans fill out their rows, the okra booms, the corn stretches eagerly toward the sky like a toddler reaching up to put on a shirt... We gardeners are right in the middle of this with our weeding and tying up, our mulching and watering, our trained eyes guarding against bugs, groundhogs, and weather damage. But to be honest, t..
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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e2b788e
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I was struck with how full a silence could be: a Carolina wren sang from the eave of the shed; cedar waxwings carried on whispery bickerings up in the cherry; a mockingbird did an odd jerky dance, as if seized by the bird spirit, out on the driveway. The pea bowl rang like an insistent bell as we tossed in our peas.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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16cdd3d
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The view from our garden is spectacular. I thought about people I knew who right at that moment might be plucking chickens, picking strawberries and lettuce, just for us. I felt grateful to the people involved, and the animals also. I don't say this facetiously. I sent my thanks across the county, like any sensible person saying grace before a meal.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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558cfec
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On the hill behind her crows flew one by one into the bare trees, arranging their dark blots in the scrim of branches and adding their warnings to the drear sounds of this day. Gone, gone, they rasped. Here was a dead world learning to speak in dissonant, unbearable sounds.
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nature
crows
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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37e489c
|
It wasn't all a waste," she told him over and over, holding on. Some things they got right, she was sure of that. The children. And for all the rest they wept, a merged keening that felt bottomless. For the years and years of things that didn't exist, fantasies of flight where there was no flight. Nothing, really, but walking away on your own two feet. She felt tears frozen on her face."
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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824b953
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Sadness is more or less like a head cold--with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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285b51c
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This is all going to scare us to death," she said. "You and me. But we're still going to have to do it."
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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9fcfa05
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One red feather for celebration. No one yet has seen it but me. When Miss Dickinson says, "Hope is the thing with feathers," I always think of something round--a ball from one of the games I will never play--stuck all around like a clove-orange sachet with red feathers. I have pictured it many times--Hope!--wondering how I would catch such a thing one-handed, if it did come floating down to me from the sky. Now I find it has fallen already,..
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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eeb7504
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Tall and straight I may appear, but I will always be Adah inside. A crooked little person trying to tell the truth. The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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07d7ab2
|
Killing is a culturally loaded term, for most of us inextricably tied up with some version of a command that begins, "Thou shalt not." Every faith has it. And for all but perhaps the Jainists of India, that command is absolutely conditional. We know it does not refer to mosquitoes."
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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71bc699
|
A hundred different paths may lighten the world's load of suffering. Giving up meat is one path; giving up bananas is another. The more we know about our food system, the more we are called into complex choices.
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Barbara Kingsolver |