In the Washington Post, Kingsolver contrasts the conventional modern attitude that we’re too good for dirty, food-producing labor with another modern attitude: that we aren’t. There’s no free lunch, Indian farming activist Vandana Shiva tells Kingsolver upon her visit to Shiva’s experimental farm in the foothills of the Himalayas. “Most of those who have moved off of farms are still working in the industry of creating food and bringing it to consumers: as cashiers, truck drivers, even the oil-rig workers who generate the fuels to run the trucks. Industrial agriculture did not ‘save’ anyone from that work, it only shifted people into other forms of food service.” 

We’re lying to ourselves if we think, like the editor at an American homemaking magazine whom Kingsolver met at a New York dinner party, that the future is devoid of cooking or growing food. “No animal can really escape the work of feeding itself,” Kingsolver insists. We’re just the only one with fancy clothes and big enough brains to make up a story like that.” 

The Green Revolution, or the application of technology to farming in the 1970s that was supposed to free hundreds of farmers from dirty work, leaving one farmer “with the right tools and chemicals” to feed the rest, has only succeeded in displacing the labor. Sure, there are fewer farmers out there tilling land, but more of them are in factories generating pesticides, driving trucks, unloading grocery boxes. And this is supposed to be a good thing?

“The nutrition transition is driven by economic changes that coerce people into jobs that give them no time for food culture,” believes Shiva. To this end, she now offers courses at what she calls the Grandmothers’ University, which link traditional agriculture and food customs with modern ways of thinking about sustainable agriculture and upholding traditions. Her institute saves the germ plasm of oilseeds, mustard seeds, barleys, wheats, and 380 varieties of rice (about 50,000 varieties used to flourish in South Asia; now, the number hovers around 5,000). 

Some American institutes—the Seed Savers Exchange, the Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture, the Center for Urban Agriculture at Fairview Gardens, for example—are up to the same kinds of ideas. They’ve realized that, no matter how hard we wish to distance ourselves from food and the soil, we’ll always have to eat—and that it’s people, using the lessons learned from history (both good and bad), who’ll do the best job of putting food on the world’s table.