Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

This chapter takes its title from the huge tomato harvest the family gets in August, which is the month that “always brings on a surplus of nearly every vegetable we grow, along with the soft summer fruits” (199). To make the most of this bounty, Kingsolver cans or dries the tomatoes and many other vegetables. She is careful to point out that one must can items carefully and with special attention to acid levels.

She uses the description of her family’s huge harvest to describe several interesting issues that local farmers have faced. The first concerns the brand “Appalachian Harvest,” which packages food from participating farmers who grow organically (202). The company sells to supermarkets which “only accept properly packaged, coded, and labeled produce that conforms to certain standards of color, size, and shape” (205). As a result, it doesn’t accept lots of “perfectly edible but small or oddly shaped vegetables” (205). The company donates this food to low-income families instead.

During the same summer, many organic tomato farmers found that supermarkets were not buying their produce. Instead, organic tomatoes “from California had begun coming in just a few dollars cheaper” (211). They, too, gave away their excess to those in need, but suffered losses.