Confessions of a 'Sugar Person'

I don’t understand Barbara Kingsolver’s family-wide fixation with bananas. As they slog through a year of glorious organic produce and poultry in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, figuring out that it is as good as it sounds – having lots of gorgeous food from the garden – and that it’s as hard as it sounds – preparing in advance all that glorious stuff for winter – she keeps coming back to bananas.

Being a bit of a traveler, I’ve actually had bananas where they’re from, and they’re not that good in Seattle by comparison. I really think on bananas the way Kingsolver describes tomatoes: pretty phenomenal in the right circumstances, but hardly worth it otherwise. Anyhow, with all that great summer squash she harvested, there’s no need for bananas! They substitute very nicely.

When Kingsolver’s family set out to eat local food for one year, they allowed few big outside purchases, exceptions being olive oil, pasta, and flour. There were some further breaches made for beverages such as coffee, hot chocolate, and wine. That being said, I never noticed her calculated consumption of sugar. I was looking for it, too. And I know there was some, because they made jam!

The truth is that I have romanticized the idea of a self-sufficient farm where I could figure out how to grow what I want to eat (on a hard rock candy mountain), only to come to the realization that even though garden fresh fruits and vegetables are incredibly sweet, I just might want more than honey sometimes. Here you may take into account that I am a pastry chef!

The romantic ideals go back to Little House in the Big Woods when Laura Ingalls Wilder has bear for dinner and asks for the leg, or at Christmas gets maple sugar candy for a huge spectacular treat. Or, later, maybe by Plum Creek, when there’s an orange at a party that she delights in eating, segment by segment. I remember trying to savor the oranges that I got in my stocking as a kid – but knowing it was from our huge box of oranges really spoiled that, so I usually just returned them to the kitchen and curled up with my newest book instead.

Devouring books is no new thing for me, and I did gobble this book on “A Year of Food Life” faster than Kingsolver and her whole extended family could get through one home grown, free range Thanksgiving turkey. Like Kingsolver’s novel-writing, her personality comes through, sometimes overly precious, but still compelling. I do appreciate authors with less partisan political bent, but often enough she left that alone and discussed the real issue: food.