Chapter 11: Slow Food Nations
In Chapter 11, Kingsolver visits David and Elsie, a husband and wife couple who run their own farm. The chapter serves to highlight the effects of different farming techniques utilized by industrial and family farmers. The contrast is glaring when the Author and her friends drive between a pair of fields. The first had been cared for with natural fertilizer and crop rotations by David’s family for generations. The second had, until a decade previous, been farmed industrially with ammonia based fertilizer and a consistent crop year after year. Even after a decade of small farming techniques, the formerly industrial field looked less healthy than the family run field.
In an interesting stylistic choice, Kingsolver declines to mention one key detail about David and Elsie until very nearly the end of the chapter. The couple is Amish. The most likely reason for this was to control the perception of the reader throughout the chapter. Kingsolver wants the audience to think of the couple as “normal” and by withholding that piece of information; the reader doesn’t give a second thought to the couple’s cultural identity.
Chapter 12: Zucchini Larceny
Chapter 12 is dedicated to the comic overabundance of squash (zucchini specifically) that the farm harvests during the mid-summer season. The following passage sums up the experience. “Garrison Keillor says that 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.”
Lily’s Chickens are also beginning to come of age in this chapter. This is another source of comedy as the growing roosters demonstrate, “The most ham-fisted attempts at courtship I’ve ever had to watch. (And yes, I’m including high school.)”
Overall, the writing of this chapter is simply funny. Much of the book (when it’s not relating statistics) has a deadpan sense of humor, but it is most clearly and densely demonstrated in this chapter. Most of the chapter consists of these humorous stories, as opposed to the more serious relation of data relevant to the chapter. As a result, the chapter is lighter on information pertaining to national farming trends, but heavy on entertainment. It serves as a nice break between the previous chapter (which has been about the damage caused by pesticides and other industrial farming practices) and the next (which will cover the effects political ideology on views concerning farmers.)
-Zachary Brandt
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