Friday, October 05, 2007

Barbara Kingsolver: Who Wants to Eat Dirty Vegetables?

In her book in which she writes of her family’s experiment to try and grow enough vegetables and meat to support them, Barbara Kingsolver addresses a prevalent resistance among children and adults:

“I used to take my children’s friends out to the garden to warm them up to the idea of eating vegetables, but this strategy sometimes backfired: they’d back away slowly saying, ‘Oh, man, those things touched dirt!’”

“Adults do the same by pretending it all comes from the clean, well-lighted grocery store. We’re like petulant teenagers rejecting our mother. We know we came out of her but ee-ew.”

Source: Barbara Kingsolver with Steven L Hopp & Camille Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: Our Year of Seasonal Eating (London: Faber & Faber, 2007), 29.

A review of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, is at Reviewing Books and Movies.

Image: Dirty veges.