Hayvan Sebze Mucize

İngilizcesini çok beğenerek okumakta olduğum "Animal Vegetable Miracle" kitabını Barbara Kingsolver yazmış. (Faber and Faber yayınevi, 2007). Yurtdışından çok para verip getirttiğim kitabın sayfaları elimde dağılsa da haziran sonunu anlattığı bölüme kadar gelebildim.

Yazar, ailecek sadece yerel yiyeceklerle beslenme kararı verip kendi yiyeceklerini üreterek geçen bir yılı anlatıyor eşi ve kızı ile birlikte. Yerel ve küçük ölçekli üretimin güzelliğine övgüler yağdırıyor. Yiyecek endüstrisinin çoklu olumsuzluklarından sıyrılabilmiş canlı bir örnek görmek ne güzel.

Kitaptan biraz alıntı:

"The first time he watched Steven pull long, orange carrots out of the ground, he demanded: "How'd you get them in there?"

Steven held forth with condensed Intro Botany. Starts with a seed, grows into a plant. Water, sunlight, leaves, roots. "A carrot," Steven concluded, is actually a root."

"Uh-huh..." said Malcolm doubtfully.

A crowd had gathered now. Steven engaged his audience by asking, "Can you guys think of other foods that might be root vegetables?"

Malcolm checked with his pals, using a lifeline before confidently submitting his final answer: "Spaghetti?" (sayfa 12)

"...as the farmers produced those extra calories, the food industry figured out how to get them into the bodies of people who didn't really want to eat 700 more calories a day. That is the well-oiled machine we call Late Capitalism." (sayfa 14)

"Modern U.S. consumers now get to taste less than 1 percent of the vegetable varieties that were grown here a century ago." (sayfa 49)

"According to USDA records from the 1990s, farms less than 4 acres (1,6 hectare) in size had an average net income of 1400 dolars per acre. The per-acre profit declines steadily as farm size grows, to less than 40 dolars an acre for farms above thousand acres. Smaller farms maximize productivity in three ways: by using each square foot of land more intensively, by growing a more diverse selection of products suitable to local food preferences, and by selling more directly to consumers, reaping more of the net earnings. Small-farm profits are more likely to be sustained over time, too, since these farms tend to be better stewards of the land, using fewer chemical imputs, causing less soil erosion, maintaining more wildlife habitat.

If smaller is economically better, why are the little guys going out of bussines? Aside from their being more labor-intensive, marketing is the main problem. Supermarkets prefer not to bother with boxes of vegetables if they can buy truckloads. Small operators have to be both grower and marketer, selling their products one bushel at a time. They're doing everything right, they just need customers." (sayfa 76)

* (Amerika'da çok satıldığı için olsa gerek) çevirisi de yayınlandı. Çeviride referanslar ve kaynaklar bölümü malesef yok. Şöyle bir inceleyince de birkaç tuhaflık göze çarpıyor: smashing pumpkins'in paramparça balkabakları olması gibi!