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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> Barbara Kingsolver was born in 1955 in Annapolis, Maryland,

See!  Yankee!!   The definition of a Yankee is anyone born more than 50 miles 
north of where you were born.


 >and grew up in rural Kentucky. 

We have a saying around here, "Just because the cat had her kittens in the 
oven, it don't make 'em biscuits."

You don't just move to a place and suddenly your are from there.  The present 
is the case in point.  Kingsolver has lived here for years, and yet the real 
locivor culture that has existed here for living memory ... she doesn't seem 
to have picked up on it at all.

As a native of a score of generations on both sides of my family, I can tell 
you that a perennial fact of life is people whose family came here a few 
years 
ago (a few could be fifty), looked around, said "Ah, that's what THOSE people 
are like" and passed this down to the next generation.   One does not 
acclimate to a culture under such circumstances.  

As to Kingsolver, who knows unless they know her personally?  But when you 
live in an area abounding with a great deal of locivorism and your greatest 
testimony to it is Anthony's grant-monger farmer's market, it shows that 
maybe all 
that local culture didn't get absorbed all that much after all.


>Also she was not impressed by the fact that "They " were grant mongers, but 
by the desire to grow, produce and sell locally.


I seriously doubt she's aware of it, or at least of the extent of it.  If you 
pulled the ARC money from the ASD farmer's market in Abingdon, it would 
evaporate immediately.  Likewise if the Tenn Dept of Ag money were pulled 
from the 
farmers' markets in Bristol, Kingsport, and Johnson City, they's be gone over 
night.

Is that really lcoally produced food?  It depends on imported tax money just 
as surely as the agribusiness depends on imported oil.  It pruports to be a 
paradigm, show the way to us poor ignorant locals how we could grow food and 
sell it, and yet the training wheels ever come off.  

Yet, if you have reason to be in Bristol, take a drive down Weaver pike.  
Just past the industrial park and just before Old Jonesboro Road, on the 
right 
you will see the sign I spoke of advertising turnips and cressies.  It's been 
there for more than thirty years.   Just after that is where 394 passes over 
Weaver Pike.  During the late summer there will be an old red pick up and a 
fellow in a folding chair with jars of honey, molasses, shelly beans, melons, 
and 
sweet corn from his garden.  He's been there as long as I can remember.

And if you should spot someone up on the steep easement above here, a wild, 
unkept man picking blackberries ... that will be me.

But when it comes to a book on local food ... this area is full of such 
people, such characters.  The accident of birth or place of rearing is 
trumped 
completely out of the picture when this far more important expression of 
locivorism is either transparent or ignored.

James   </HTML>