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Together at the Table: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and Thoreau’s Wild Fruits Gioia Woods n her 2007 book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, Barbara Kingsolver asks if “the story of bread, from tilled ground to our table, [is] less relevant to our lives than the history of the thirteen colonies” (9). One hundred and fifty years earlier in his last manuscript, Wild Fruits, Henry David Thoreau had also commented on the extra-nutritive value of food: “better for us is the wild cherry than the pineapple . . . not on account of their flavor merely, but the part they play in our education” (5). That Kingsolver should echo Thoreau’s belief in the transcendent and educational value of food will come as no surprise to her readers. Thoreau, as Lawrence Buell points out, “stands for nature” in the American environmental imagination. Although Thoreau tends to embody American environmental values, Buell laments that he has not “engendered any canonical progeny, at least within the field of literature” (9). I propose here that the Thoreau of Wild Fruits, the later Thoreau who had moved from a lively interest in natural history to a deep, expert familiarity in his local flora and fauna borne of hours of close observation, has indeed left literary progeny. Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is, in many ways, that kin. The pages that follow explore the relationship between the two texts and examine the ways ideological discourses of science, economics, and politics meet to produce a revised aesthetic, an environmental aesthetic. The deep engagement these discourses demand move the reader from passive observer of the beautiful to active constructor of it. But first, what is the common ideological ground, and where are the disparities? I Gioia Woods 264 American Literary Contexts Values inhere in the arts of a culture. In order to discern a culture’s values and attitudes, we should first look to its aesthetic expression. There we will find both a historical repository of values and an active force shaping these values. In American environmental literature we discern, as Buell succinctly writes, “old world desire . . . American cultural nationalism . . . [and] discourse of American exceptionalism” (3–4). These ideological discourses are certainly present in Wild Fruits, and two of the three are present in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. The texts share a certain pastoral nostalgia, which in American literature has often stood as an antidote to the ills of urban industrialization : in Wild Fruits Thoreau imbues fields with an Arcadian sense of rustic seclusion; Kingsolver valorizes her family’s rural experience, from small-town post-office to close-knit neighbors. As for cultural nationalism, Thoreau, in keeping with his time, considers New England the New Eden; Kingsolver practices a twenty-first-century form of romantic nationalism in her quest to illustrate how an exceptional geography can shape a “natural” (locovore) economy. Thoreau’s nationalism is closely tied to the rhetoric of American exceptionalism. The nation is distinct because of its rugged, frontier spirit that engenders liberty and egalitarianism and that can be sampled in its wild fruit by those with the appropriate “savage tastes.” Thoreau shares the confidence our nation’s founders had in the continent’s abundant resources; he urges his fellow Americans to deeply appreciate the flavors inherent in those fruits. Kingsolver, on the other hand, while celebrating the potential for those distinct American flavors, rejects the geographical link to moral superiority that characterizes exceptionalist ideology. She has made a career of challenging American exceptionalism and continues to do so here. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle often reads as a lament for the loss of American potential—the tyranny of consumption has resulted in the loss of local flavors; our wealth has resulted in a loss of health. Perhaps we are exceptional in other areas, she ironically suggests: we do not know where our food comes from, our younger generation has a shorter projected lifespan than their parents, we are engaged in an epic struggle against obesity, and we cannot even speak of an American national cuisine. The wild and savage tastes celebrated by her nineteenth-century forebear are all but lost, hiding in the seeds of an heirloom tomato. Americanists have written millions of words about how the American frontier became an androcentric trope for pastoral escape or wilderness ad- 265 Together at the Table venture.1 Despite his being a long-canonized writer of the American Renaissance , we find a slightly different legacy, neither escape nor adventure, in Thoreau’s Wild Fruits. Although Thoreau does not...

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