Week 10!!!! Now that we are at the end of the quarter I wanted to take some time to reflect back on what we’ve learned in this class…. Over the past nine weeks we have examined and thought about a lot of the issues in our current food system. I know I’ve learned a lot from all of you, and have really changed the way I think about my food. I wanted to take a moment to thank all of you from bringing up so many important and crucial topics! I’ve noticed that so many topics have drawn from individual passions and interests. On that theme I wanted to attempt to synthesis some of what we’ve talked about (keeping everyones interests in mind) and start a conversation on how we are going to apply this class past K. I want to focus on solutions/personal empowerment for our last class, be it large scale or small scale.
Okay, first I looked into ways to farm/garden anywhere in the U.S.
Check out this article about the top 10 cities for urban farming and the circumstances that made their urban farming boom.
Next I wanted to look into ways to grow your own food in a backyard OR an apartment:
Take a look at these:
Starting your own small scale garden in a house: http://eartheasy.com/grow_backyard_vegetable_garden.html
Or an apartment: http://www.urbanorganicgardener.com/2012/01/7-location-ideas-for-apartment-and-urban-gardens/
In this vain I found a TED talk about one women finding a way to garden anywhere:
(please watch)
Okay, after watching that and looking at the articles I would love to hear your reflections. Does it seem doable? In what way could you make your own food? What issues do you see with this? How can you use this wherever you live next?
If this seems like an unlikely solution for you that’s fine! I know after looking into it I really want to grow my own food, but will I? Will I make the time? So I also wanted to look at a more personal relationship with eating. I looked into eating with intention/love. I found a lot of articles, but mainly they were just bossy and judge, until I saw this one:
I liked this blog post because it points out that your relationship with food is yours. So often we get caught up in how to’s: how to be happy, eat right, lose weight, make better choices. And, we forget that each of us is the best judge of what we need. After looking at this how do you want to change or keep your relationship with food? Does eating with intention seem like a solution? If so how? If not what is a better solution for you?
I know these are just a few solutions/ideas, and in no way fix all that is going on in our food system. I just wanted to dedicate some time to think about how, we can each positively impact ourselves and the world around us (in some way).
SO, ultimately, in your response’s I’d like you to reflect on how you want to apply this class after K.
Another great blog that got me thinking! After having all of these conversations about food justice and the problems with our current food system I have at times felt helpless. How can I make a difference? The problem is so huge and intertwined with some many other aspects of our society that it seems impossible at time to steer the ship around. However, when considering the work Amy and John are doing as well as the woman in the TED talk video you had us watch I feel inspired. Change on the small-scale is something very needed in regard to this issue. One of the barriers I think that keeps people from growing their own food or experimenting with hydroponics is the idea that they do not have the intelligence or expertise to be successful. I will say that before this class I also felt that growing food was something too complicated and difficult for me. As Amy has said and as the woman in the TED talk discussed that feeling of inadequacy is something that we have been taught and serves the system well by keeping the general public disengaged from the mechanics of growing food.
ReplyDeleteAnyways through my work on the farm, through watching and talking with Amy and John and all of my classmates I have become inspired. I can grow food! I can experiment and I can fail and try again. Growing my own produce seems to me a way I can “make a difference” and learn more while I do so. After graduation and when I move back to my parents I plan on starting a raised bed garden. I want to start slow with a few different hardy vegetables and see where it goes from there. I am genuinely excited about the prospect of starting my own garden and sharing my knowledge and food with those I love and live around. I know the first garden I create will not be perfect. I will have to put in a lot of work, but I see this as a lifelong commitment and I look forward to all the gardens I work on that fail and succeed. I look to improve every year!
The things you bring up in this blog post have really been on my mind lately. As well as this class I am in the Gardening Lit course so food and food justice has been on my mind all quarter. In that class we just read Novella Carpenter's "Farm City," a memoir in which the the author becomes an urban farmer in her small apartment in Oakland California. This really got me thinking. If Novella can have a full garden and several animals while juggling three jobs in a tiny apartment, I sure can at least grow some plants in my backyard. We were talking the other day about how people choose to be ignorant of the impact we each individually have on the world. I may be one person in billions, but the environmental footprint I will leave on this world is enormous. So even if my life calling isn't farming, by simply growing my own food or trying to buy food from honorable sources (given that I am able) I think I am really effecting change. I think the blog you site really sums up the point of this class. We need to be aware. We can't pretend like what is going on in the world and the way we effect that isn't happening. What we choose to do from then on is our choice, but we at least need to be honest and knowledgeable and make the choices concerning food (and everything) intentionally.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, I couldn’t get the Urban Organic Gardening link to load, but I think I was able to gather the gist of your articles and topic this week without it. These opinion pieces and anecdotal evidences serve to return us to practicality and action – the perfect way to end this course. The final article (and your accompanying comment about “judginess”) that emphasizes eating the things that work and are healthy for you reminds me of the editing on a cookbook/lifestyle advocate book I did for Kelly the Kitchen Cop (here’s her website http://kellythekitchenkop.com/) my sophomore year. On the surface, her message of clean eating and healthy living works. But she harbors some dangerous opinions behind the good ones, and she isn’t afraid to all but insist them upon people (on her Facebook, she has posted articles about the dangers of allowing your teenage daughter to eat vegan, the link to vaccines and autism, as well as some anti-LGBTQIA+ literature). So, yes, you have to do what works for only you and not listen blindly to the direction of someone who doesn’t know your life. Today, we’re being asked if growing some of our own food post-grad will be a choice that works for us. For me, that answer will be yes, but achieved slowly. I’ll be living in Kalamazoo with my two cats for a month before moving back to my parents’ house in Grand Rapids. Neither location or situation is ideal (non-permanence/ownership, the tendency for cats to eat the things they shouldn’t, etc., but “if you live life waiting for the perfect conditions, you’ll never get anything done”, so I would like to start by working more closely with the compost program while I’m here in the summer months to take that hands-on knowledge home and implement it with my family (though I think I am mostly interested in vermacompost, what I’ll learn will surely apply). The compost produced will go to feed my mom’s flowers in the beginning, but hopefully I will be able to make some time to prepare my own little garden for food-bearing plants for next year, and the compost will ultimately feed that! In the mean time, I will be focusing on transitioning to fresh, plant-based foods. In my post, I talk about veganism and my personal struggle with achieving it as an actively-chosen lifestyle, and I think it’s a good goal for me to keep in mind.
ReplyDeleteWhat a good post for 10th week, as we wrap everything up! Thanks, Fiona! I'm really into the (software) concept of open sourcing being applied to farming, as Britta Riley discusses in the TED talk you shared with us. That also reminded me of the Farm Hack community/website (from Amy's 8th week post), where people share their DIY blueprints for farm tools for small scale farming. http://farmhack.org/tools
ReplyDeleteI appreciate the articles you shared too. I definitely liked seeing Minneapolis- where I'm moving this coming fall- on the list of top ten cities for urban farming. It makes sense to me, given my experience living there last summer. There were a number of farmers' markets that I found or heard about, and a few urban farms or gardens near my apartment.
The part of the last article that I find most interesting is the mention of the precautionary principle and the fact that the U.S. doesn't follow it as the E.U. does. I haven't heard about this before (although it's not surprising), and underscores that the way the industrial food system currently works is not natural or "just the way it is," but is intertwined with national politics and principles. The article and the video suggest that, rather than fight big corp by supporting *alternative* big corp that claims to be more ethical (ex: conventional grocery store vs. whole foods), we might consider how we can intervene more directly- insert ourselves into the system by producing our own food or supporting community members who do...
I don't know exactly how I'll get/stay involved yet after college, but I hope/expect that I'll try to grow at least something of my own, and seek out communities involved in urban ag.
As I will be moving to Boston after graduation, I had been wondering if there is a way to apply the things I learned in this class to the next stage of my life. So thanks Fiona for bringing up this topic!
ReplyDeleteAfter seeing the TED talk video, I thought the veggie growing-devise people were using in the video seems like a lot of fun. I have one personal concern, though… I have a cat in my room, and she tries to knock over every new thing in my room. And she is coming to Boston with me. So the urban garden idea in the video might be a little bit difficult for me to do. Another issue I can think of is lack of sunlight/ difficulty of cleaning the room when the plants take over my window.
However, I am still planning on having some herb plants or radish sprouts (which can be grown with a very low maintenance effort) in my apartment, once I move to Boston. Ever since I took gardening course with Victor during my sophomore year and ate the harvested vegetables, I cannot forget the joy of eating something I made by making my hands dirty. Also, because I involved in the production process, I appreciated my food a lot when I ate them.
Thank you for bringing this topic into our space for 10th week Fiona!
ReplyDeleteTo be honest, when I pictured myself working on my own garden I assumed that it would happen a few years out. I know that I will probably be living in an apartment in the next stage of my life so I was excited to hear about the indoor gardening projects. I like the idea of starting small and growing one plant indoors. The articles that had to do with urban farming for me connected with the video shared earlier this quarter about urban bee-keeping. Those in rural spaces aren’t the only ones that can impact our food systems in a big way. In fact, I have heard arguments of spaces like New York City being more sustainable than most areas in the U.S. because of energy transfer and public transportation. Why not keep up the trend?
While I do think it’s a great idea my mind begins to envision a future world where all of our plants grew indoors and we suddenly had skyscraper, large corporation farms. I know this is unrealistic but I think we could encourage people to grow food upwards AND outwards.
I enjoyed the article that you posted because making food or eating with intention is an idea that I think could have a positive impact on our relationship to food. For me, I make food with intention or eat it when I am cooking with family or for friends. I haven’t done this in a while but when I do this I find that I appreciate my plate of food as well as those around me. I am realizing that intention can mean a variety of things and I should carry the attitude with me, even if it means eating a fast sandwich on the way to work.
I'm so excited that we're talking about this! For the last few weeks I have been thinking about what type of growing operation I would like to create at my apartment in Chicago next year. I've been compiling some info on balcony/container gardens and was actually at a gardening center on Tuesday and having a lot of fun daydreaming about my future endeavors in this arena. I found the urban organic gardener article and Britta Riley video helpful for thinking about maximizing growing options in small spaces so thank you for posting these Fiona! I think for practical/ spacial reasons, going vertical will be the most feasible option for me. I am excited to be moving to a city where there are so many awesome things going on in terms of community gardens and great farmers markets. I was happy to see that it made the top ten urban farming list. One of the ways I will be putting what I have learned in this class in to action after K is to plant some stuff! I don't know yet if this will take the shape of a rooftop or balcony container garden, participation in a community/neighborhood garden, or just a few herbs grown on a windowsill. What I do know for sure is that after this class, I am entering the next stage of my life with a definite feeling of empowerment that this is something I CAN do! All of you have been awesome sources of knowledge and support and I am so thankful to have shared in this experience with everyone.
ReplyDeleteOn another, but related, note; can we take a few minutes tomorrow to figure out who will be here over the summer to continue our Hoben garden? I definitely want to maintain what we have planted and get a sense of who else is able/interested in continuing the project.
I really appreciate that blog you’ve found; I think it sums up what I see as the ‘ideal; relationship with food really nicely—as personal. I’m so excited to live in a place where I don’t have meal swipes to fall back on (or frantically attempt to get rid of, as I’m currently doing). Forcing myself to pack lunches will allow me to pinpoint the foods my body needs and loves while examining what is economically feasible and environmentally secure. For a time, I think that might be committing to a vegetarian diet, which I haven’t been brave enough to try so far. Before this class, my motives for eating what I ate were either too abstract (to eat ‘better’) or completely nonexistent (late night candy in the Math and Physics Center).
ReplyDeleteI’m not ready to commit to growing my own food in the next year, but I’m excited to seek out people that do. When it’s possible, I want to source my food locally. I’ve heard that Madison has a killer farmer’s market in the summer that rings around the Capitol building—within walking distance of where I’m looking at apartments! I also want to find a community of food-producing-apartment-dwellers in the city. I hope that by seeing the successful methods of others, I can evaluate what works best in the local conditions. An added bonus of this community will be the social pressure to actually start growing my own food! If nothing else, I’ll have a pot of basil growing. Hopefully some oregano, too.
Thank you for asking each of us to reflect on how we might apply our conversations in this class beyond the K bubble, Fiona! I liked the TED talk about open-sourced and collaboratively-developed hydroponic technologies. Like Maddie mentioned, it reminded me of the Farm Hack site—which seems to be incredibly helpful to farmers looking to subvert heavy machinery on a budget. However, I wondered about a few things in listening to her talk. Are these technologies cheap? Are they relatively easy to construct? It seems that there might be some intersections of those who have little space with those who have limited funds and time. I also worried that these technologies could be easily snatched up by corporations. An article we read earlier in the term noted that there was no legal option to prohibit patenting open-source seeds. I wonder if this hydroponic group is running into similar problems.
ReplyDeleteIn terms of applying the skills and conversations we’ve learned in our class, I’d like to try my hand at container gardening in my apartment in Tacoma next year. I’m pretty good at maintaining house plants, so (hopefully) some of that knowledge, in addition to the plant-tending skills we’ve learned on the farm, will facilitate that project. I am a bit worried about figuring out how to garden in rainy Washington weather, though. I’d also like to supplement this personal project with involvement in food justice communities in the region. I’m working as a community organizer/advocate for immigrant/refugee populations in the South Puget Sound, so I’m hoping that my interest in food justice will intersect in meaningful ways in that position and that I might have some leverage to continue conversations about our food system there.
This is such a great way to conclude our 10-week conversation! LOVE the Britta Riley video--for two reasons. One is the idea that we can reclaim more control over what food is available to us and the consequences of how it's produced. Two is the idea that this is done best in a community that is freely sharing ideas and creatively building on those ideas. I really do think this is how our world could be radically changed--by individuals trying out new ideas; having successes and failures; sharing those ideas, successes, and failures with others; and then trying new things based on those experiences and the ideas of others.
ReplyDeleteIf there's one thing I hope you'll take away from this class, it's this idea of trial and error as a path to learning and to changing the world. I learned to garden by reading books, then trying stuff. Then reading more books to try to figure out what to try next. Then trying more stuff. I have failed at one thing or another every single gardening season. But every time I fail at something, I try to figure out why so that that experience increases my knowledge of the world. I suspect this method doesn't only apply to farming.
I also wish for each of you that you will find work in the world that you find as deeply satisfying as farming is for me. Yes, it's hard and painful and frustrating and expensive--but it's also my path. I spent many years doing this work in the evenings and on weekends after I'd put in long days at other jobs. I feel so enormously grateful that I get to spend so much of my time now doing work that I love. And that I get to share it with folks like you. May you also be so blessed in your lives.
Thank you, Fiona, for tying up our loose ends. I appreciate your putting this into an applicable practice during our next life stage - not ten or fifteen years from now when we may have kids and houses in sweet communities, but next year when we are still in small apartments, many of us still in cities and some still in school.
ReplyDeleteI've thought a lot about how to take some of the things we've learned and apply them at home as our farm gradually exits crop production and moves toward varied income streams: syrup, fruit trees, the garden that has always fed us. being closer to home, first thing: I most definitely want bees. But I also want to keep learning and further educating myself. Throughout college I developed a new tolerance for non fiction, meaning that perhaps I'll finally dig into the billion books on horticulture and gardening and beekeeping and more on our bookshelves. I'll still be in a cramped space with only room for a few herb pots on my balcony and perhaps a hanging tomato someplace, but I'm more confident about the types of questions I can ask farmers at market and about seeking out a CSA to participate in... and about budgeting this as a priority even in the sea of student loans that awaits me. I'm also reminded of the many nuanced ivtersectionalities through which I hope that my grown up involvement with environmental law and policy work will (slowly, sometimes annoyingly, often incompletely, but still) affect the system we live within. My choices, I hope, will continue to more closely represent my values and beliefs about our roles and responsibilities in this world.
I feel that we all can work to put the knowledge that we have obtained through this course to good, practical use in our lives beyond Kalamazoo. While we may not all be able to become small, slow farmers ourselves, I would like to believe that we have all gained a greater appreciation for food and where it comes from. I believe there is no end to the good we can do if we work in small (or large) ways to reconnect with our food and nature.
ReplyDeleteI personally hope to grow many herbs and vegetables that I frequently use in cooking right in my home or apartment. I would even love to have a small aquarium that I can use for hydroponics. But regardless of what you do, it's important that you do something to change your behavior surrounding food and agriculture. Without a real behavioral change, the attitudes you hold now surrounding food and agriculture will change to match your lifestyle. And the changes we make needn't be large, it can be as simple as taking time to reflect on how our eating habits are affecting the environment, or cooking for friends and family to return some ceremony to eating.
I feel that we all can work to put the knowledge that we have obtained through this course to good, practical use in our lives beyond Kalamazoo. While we may not all be able to become small, slow farmers ourselves, I would like to believe that we have all gained a greater appreciation for food and where it comes from. I believe there is no end to the good we can do if we work in small (or large) ways to reconnect with our food and nature.
ReplyDeleteI personally hope to grow many herbs and vegetables that I frequently use in cooking right in my home or apartment. I would even love to have a small aquarium that I can use for hydroponics. But regardless of what you do, it's important that you do something to change your behavior surrounding food and agriculture. Without a real behavioral change, the attitudes you hold now surrounding food and agriculture will change to match your lifestyle. And the changes we make needn't be large, it can be as simple as taking time to reflect on how our eating habits are affecting the environment, or cooking for friends and family to return some ceremony to eating.