By Lisa Purchase Kelly
Jim Crissman's debut novel Root Cause: The Story of
a Food Fight Fugitive tells the story of Bruce Dinkle, who becomes obsessed with eating
only local food. After alienating his family by enforcing a strict locavore and
urban agriculturist lifestyle, he abandons them by bicycle on a quixotic quest
to learn where food comes from.
Crissman grows a lot of his own food, likes a good local brew now
and then, and rides his bicycle as much as he can. Bruce, the main character
in his novel (Root Cause), also produces most of his own food, drinks a local
microbrew, and rides a bike instead of driving a car. That's where the
similarities end.
"He is not a sympathetic character," says Crissman of Bruce
Dinkle. "He makes a lot of good arguments, he's not entirely wrong, he's just
over the edge. It's his way or the highway. If Bruce was a women's rights
advocate, he'd be a bra-burner. If he supported PETA, he'd be a cat-lady.
This is someone who can take a good idea and run it right into the ground …
try to save the world, but screw up your family."
And screw it up he does. After ramming his food ethics down their
throats, he takes his malcontent and rides off into the sunset on his Schwinn
to look for some sort of morally perfect lifestyle that his unwieldy family
seems to be preventing him from attaining. At this point, wacky hijinx ensue
… pretty much right from the beginning to the end of the book.
"I thought it was going to be a road movie, with Bruce moving through
a variety of regions and foods. But the characters took over, and Bruce
didn't get very far. It was fun to put the characters in a situation and
throw stuff at them, and just see what happens. Sometimes they almost
wrote their own dialogue."
There is a big dose of factual information on food, farm machinery,
and fertilizers in the book. Crissman brought a good amount of his career
background in veterinary medicine and pathology into the story. "The
studies of pathology and toxicology give a person a pretty broad scientific
perspective on the challenges we face as mammals living in a world of hostile
agents—all the way from the factors that cause pneumonia in cows to
chemical contaminants in human food. You get a good sense of what matters
and what doesn't."
"The other thing about being a veterinarian," Crissman adds, "is that you quickly come to
see humans as big hairless animals, with, like all species, their particular
Achilles' heels with regard to disease susceptibility, as well as individual
idiosyncrasies, sexuality, and herd behaviors."
When asked about the realism of some scenes, he explains, "As far as the veterinary scenes in the book, they come straight out
of my farm and large animal vet experience. Changed and fictionalized, yes,
but I absolutely have been up to my knees in snow, ice, mud, and manure
while trying to administer a jugular I.V. to a half-wild critter tied to a fence
on somebody's backyard hobby farm. And I've been in big efficient dairy
farms where I've been up to my shoulder in the rectum of a hundred
Holsteins before lunch. I've done a combination fetatomy/C-section on a fat
yearling heifer tied to my truck in the rain. I've had to shoot an Amishman's
workhorse mare when he couldn't. I've had to replace a cow's uterus in the
middle of the night when it was prolapsed and frozen to the barn floor. I've
had to don a rubber suit and lie down in semi-frozen pig manure to pull
piglets out of a down sow while snow was blowing down my neck. It is the
earthiest possible job—I'm still telling the stories from my one year in
large animal practice before I beat a full retreat and went back to school to
study pathology."
Crissman likens his writing style and content to the works of Carl
Hiassin (sardonic author of environmental thrillers), farm veterinarian
James Herriot ("but less wholesome"), and non-fiction food demagogue
Michael Pollan. There's also a Tom Robbins element thrown in, with the off-beat and off-color character of Wanda the Goat-Lady (she's really into
goats).
As for Jim Crissman's own philosophy of food politics: "I wanted an
entertaining story that readers would not find preachy. I do think the local
food movement is laudable, and, in fact, my wife and I grow a big vegetable
garden, and I harvest almost all of our red meat by thinning the local deer
herd with my bow. We get great satisfaction from a home-grown, home-
hunted, and home-cooked meal. But I don’t think it is reasonable or possible
to expect everyone to do that, or to expect anyone to get everything they
eat and drink from inside a hundred mile circle all of the time, especially if
you live in the northern Midwest."
Something bad boy Bruce Dinkle might have had to figure out for
himself.
© Lisa Purchase Kelly, 2011
[1.19.2011]