I'd like to start my own reflection with an excerpt from a piece I wrote last year that will give you a little background on my own relationship with farming:
"My first friends were farm animals. Cows, mostly, because my parents were dairy farmers and so I was surrounded by them. We had chickens too, but they pecked me when I tried to collect their eggs and the roosters flew at my head with their dusty wings and sharp talons whenever I entered the chicken yard. I preferred the cows. I remember one old cow who always chose the same stall in the middle of the barn. I liked to sit next to her and stroke the soft underside of her neck as she calmly chewed her cud and waited her turn to be milked. I was pretty young then, too young to be of much help in the barn, but I loved being around the cows, touching them and smelling their sweet breath.
As soon as I was tall and strong enough, I was given chores. My first responsibilities were feeding the cows and young calves, then cleaning stalls and milking. In the summer there was field work as we grew and harvested the crops that would feed the cows through the winter. It was hard, physical work but I enjoyed it. I loved being outside, working with my family. We were a team, working together to take care of the cows, who in turn took care of us by giving us milk, meat, and money. Neither of my parents had off-farm jobs, so everything we had came from those cows. If they flourished, we flourished.
No childhood is perfect, but my first ten years were pretty satisfying. I determined that I wanted to live on a farm forever and planned to marry a farmer when I grew up. (That it didn’t occur to me that I could be a farmer myself should give you an indication of the gender dynamics in my family.) It was when I was about twelve that I started to realize that something was amiss in the world of agriculture.
In the mid-80s, a decade after former Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz (read about his legacy here: http://grist.org/article/the-butz-stops-here/) extorted farmers to “get big or get out,” the dairy industry hit a crisis. Production, bolstered in part by government price-supports and buy-ups of surplus product, rose to unsustainable levels. As part of an attempt to reduce the surplus milk flooding the market, the federal Dairy Termination Program offered a buyout option which paid farmers to stop milk production.
I imagine that a conversation similar to the one my family had one February evening took place across many farmhouse kitchen tables that year. My father explained the terms of program. We’d have to sell the cows and agree not to produce milk for a certain number of years, which meant we’d be done dairying, since it wasn’t feasible to get back into the business after being out for several years.
“Well, family, what do you think?” my father asked, looking from my mother to my brother to me. “Should we take it?”
“No!” I yelled, shaking my head vigorously, eyes wide, shocked that we would even consider such a thing. I couldn’t imagine life without the cows, without the farm. What would we do?
I don’t know how much my reaction actually figured into my father’s decision not to take the buyout. Many of the small dairies in our county did. And though my parents didn’t stop farming when I was a kid, they determined that they would be the last generation of my family to farm. “Go to college,” they told my brother and me. “Get a good job off the farm. You can’t make a living doing this on a small scale—it’s too hard.”
The agricultural policies promoted by Butz and others who shared his interests (and the fallout from these policies) have changed the landscape and ecosystem in which I live. Once my township and those surrounding it were dotted with small, diverse farms. My father remembers the days when every family had a garden, a pig, a cow, and some chickens. Now a few large farms dominate the area with corn, soybeans, and dairy herds which contain thousands of cattle (at its biggest, my parents’ herd was a couple of hundred).
“Plant fencerow to fencerow,” Butz said. Today, even the fencerows have been cut and plowed, destroying precious buffer zones and ecologically diverse habitats. In the effort to get maximum yields per acre, erodible land is tilled and soil washes into our rivers and streams. Chemical fertilizers and herbicides have destroyed the life in our soil and they also wash into our watershed, wreaking havoc in our aquatic ecosystems. Livestock, also, are pushed to the limits of production through breeding, feeding, and confinement practices that leave them with shortened and unpleasant lives. And farm workers share that same fate as they put in exhausting workdays which frequently include dangerous working conditions and exposures to toxic substances.
If asked what I think the biggest problem in our current food system is, I’d answer that it resides within our relationships—our relationships with ourselves, each other, and the non-human beings who sustain our lives. We have, in this country, a system of relationships based on exploitation in the name of maximum production and profit. For the most part, we accept this as the normal state of things. We accept that shoppers are going to try to get the most/best goods they can for their shopping dollar, that employers are going to try to get the most work out of their employees for the least compensation, and that farmers will try to get the most production out of their soil with the least amount of care expressed as labor and expense. It doesn’t matter so much to us that our shopping dollars support employers who force workers to labor in unsafe conditions for poverty wages and we have entirely forgotten that the health of the soil has anything to do with us. We have forgotten that our health and our fates are intertwined with that of both our human and our biotic communities."
My re-entry into farming as a small-scale vegetable grower in 2010 was motivated by a desire to enter into a more intimate, conscious, and conscientious relationship with my local community. I'd been growing my own food for many years and the idea of sharing the joy I found in that work with others as a part of a larger movement to transform our food systems excited me. I was especially attracted to the Community Supported Agriculture model of farming, since it seemed to offer a relationally-based alternative to the "cash-for-product" economy which (in its focus on product rather than process) often passes hidden (and not-so-hidden) costs on to the larger community and future generations in the form of ecosystem degradation and threatened health and well-being.
Over the past six years of developing and working this business, I've experienced deep satisfactions and deep grief. I've moved from hope to discouragement and back to hope again. I've pulled myself back from the edge of burnout and bitterness, dug deep to recover the joy I find in working with the earth, and learned (am learning!) how to be increasingly honest with my community about what I need from them in order to sustain this work.
I suspect that in order to create a truly sustainable and resilient agricultural system, we have to change some of our fundamental cultural beliefs about who we are in relationship to the other beings of this earth and to the earth itself. My farming practices are an exploration of the possibilities for those changes in my own life and being. I take inspiration from people like Winona LaDuke, who remind me that there are cultures who are living in a very different paradigm of relationship than that promoted by Earl Butz and others who share his vision of agricultural success. Take a listen to this TED talk of LaDuke's to see what I mean:
In your comments, I would like to hear your own reflections about your relationships to food, farming, and community. What beliefs and knowledge about food and farming did you absorb through the circumstances of your childhoods and early adulthoods? When did you first begin to be aware that something was amiss within our agricultural systems? How have you responded to this awareness?
My mother’s parents owned a small farm: chickens, horses, milk cows, and a vegetable garden for the family. Of their six children, none remained on the family land. My uncle moonlights as a pumpkin farmer each autumn, but he’s a full-time middle school principal. Our distance from farming, in all but memory and nostalgia, led to a rosy view of all forms of food production. This influence was coupled with my father’s biases; his parents, the children of immigrants, embraced all forms of American development. I was raised to respect the producers of my food, but never to do it myself. The American food production system was considered to be an essential aid to the American dream.
ReplyDeleteI lived by these assumptions until my first year at K. Before that, our local Meijer was only a quick drive from my home; the small farmer’s market was an easy bike ride every Saturday. When my parents moved me in to my freshman dorm, I was shocked by how far away the closest grocery stores were! There were so many homes surrounding campus; why was there nowhere closer to buy real food? For the first time, I became aware of conversations surrounding not only access to food, but to what kind of food. I started working at a local organic garden the following summer, and I helped sell our produce at the farmer’s market. I noticed that the clientele was largely white and middle-class. Though this demographic is largely reflective of my hometown, I’ve noticed a similar trend at the Kalamazoo Farmer’s Market and the People’s Food Co-op. The only way to make diverse and healthy food available and affordable is to grow more of it, something our current system isn’t cultivating.
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ReplyDeleteAs a young child I thought very little about my food and where it came from. As I grew up in a city I was aware that the food was shipped and brought in, but from where I was unsure.
ReplyDeleteAs I grew older (and turned 12) I began going to farm camp in Newport, Pennsylvania. My aunt had gone to the camp as well, and ultimately worked there. In its hay day the camp had run as a tomato farm where the campers’ where essentially free labor. My aunt had loved the experience because of the relationship she developed to her food and the pay off of the work she did. For this reason she suggested I attended as well. When I went the tomato farm was really no more, but there was still a garden, chickens, pigs, cows and lots of land with rich soil. Through this camp I was allowed to become more intimately involved with my food (as everything we ate we produced). Over the six years I attended this camp, I also witnessed some local farmers forced to end their small operation farms because of the pressure from big business. This inability to profit from his chicken farm without big business backing was the first time I saw the “fast” food movement. It was my first realization of our countries current disconnect from food.
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ReplyDeleteI have no farmers in my family members, but I have somewhat close relationship with food. I moved from Japan to the United States when I was 10 years old. When I went to a supermarket in this country, I remember being shocked by looking at ugly vegetables and fruits sitting in the produce section at Farmer Jack. Later I realized that the asymmetrical, awkward shapes of vegetables were natural variations and totally edible. Until then, however, I did not know that. Although my experience may sound weird to you, this same culture shock is often experienced by immigrants and tourists from Japan. If you go to a Japanese supermarket, you will notice something peculiar: all the tomatoes have almost exactly the same red color and roundness, nearly identical sizes of daikon radishes are piled up in the fridge, and similar looking asparaguses are bundled in groups of 3. Only “pretty” looking vegetables and fruits are sold at supermarket, while the rest is often thrown away as trash.
ReplyDeleteI personally feel this is too wasteful. Although American supermarkets seem to be more tolerant about natural, awkward looking vegetables, I assume that a lot of vegetable and fruit products are still being thrown away in the process of selection. I would like to ask everyone’s opinions regarding to this point. I believe food should be treated with more respect, and many people should appreciate the value of food.
ReplyDeleteFood was always something I enjoyed but never something I gave much thought to. In preschool when we had to bring in snacks I literally asked my mom if we could bring smoked salmon. In the second grade when asked what my favorite food was I said the buffet. I have always been a foodie, but it wasn’t probably until my college years that I thought of food as more than just the effect it has on my taste buds.
As I mentioned on the other post, I have taken a variety of Native American lit courses and some of the food justice issues prevalent for native communities sparked an interest in food justice for me. I also took the sophomore seminar Food and Travel Writing and that definitely was a turning point for me in my understanding of food. We read The Omnivore’s Dilemma, as well as many other texts analyzing food, and it had a huge impact on me, particularly the section about vegetarianism. I am not a vegetarian but this chapter made me really decide that when it is my choice, if I am going to consume meat I should do so through farms that treat their animals well and give them a happy and full life. I thought a lot about the importance of locally grown foods and how even if we buy something that is organic from Whole Foods, the distance that food may have traveled and the energy expended to get it here has other serious ramifications that need to be considered. This new way of viewing food consumption was only intensified when I studied abroad in France and saw how differently their way of viewing and eating food is. Bread is bought fresh daily. Meals are enjoyed slowly. Eating is an event to be enjoyed and the food that is brought to that event is extremely important. Through my experience of reading about agriculture and food and my experience abroad, I have developed an appreciation for agricultural systems that aim to fix what has gone amiss, and I am excited to finally have a hands on experience with this process.
I never really gave much thought to where my food came from during my early childhood. I was too concerned with how it tasted, and how much of it I could shovel into my gaping maw. That said, eating was almost always an enjoyable experience for me and my family. I inherited my love for food from my mother, a small woman from Daegu, South Korea, whose endless appetite is only matched by her love of cooking. She would always lament that she enjoyed her own cooking too much; a never-ending cycle of overcooking and overeating. Through my mother's cooking and love of food, I have developed an appreciation for food and its preparation. However it wasn't until later in life that I became aware of just how important food, and where it comes from, really is.
ReplyDeleteAs you may have guessed, my love of food lead me to be quite overweight as a child. Well, I shouldn't say that food made me fat, garbage made me fat, and I ate like a trash compactor. I played the microwave like a violin, and it would sing over symphonies of hot pockets, TV dinners, and all manner of frozen food that I got my hands on. I would inhale fast food at an alarming rate, my brother (a keen businessman) even took advantage of my habit, going so far as to sell me his extra burgers at a marked up price. However, this all ended after I entered high school. I joined the swim and water polo teams, and I started to lose weight. I liked that very much. Hoping to keep the ball rolling, I decided to give up fast food and ice cream (trust me, it was for the best), and made commitments to eat healthier. And I didn't only lose more weight, I started to feel better physically and mentally, it was as if every pound shed also lifted a psychological weight that was keeping me from being truly happy.
Since then, I have continued my pursuit of fitness and eating healthy. Years later, I can't eat fast food without getting ill, and I have never felt better. I have learned through my courses in biology, chemistry, and psychology just how important a role food plays in keeping you alive and healthy. I have learned through experience that you really are what you eat, and we cannot afford to be ignorant of where our food comes from. Food is so fundamental to our lives, and it deserves the utmost respect, to treat your food any less than you would treat yourself is to do yourself and the world a great disservice.
I grew up surrounded by miles of corn and soybean fields in central Illinois, an area blessed with some of the richest soil in the country. Agricultural research is huge in my hometown due to well-funded programs at the University of Illinois. However, despite being surrounded by large scale food production, I rarely gave much thought to the big picture implications of these farming practices as a child. I was just happy to have so much green space to run around in. Growing up, I was privileged in knowing that there would always be a well stocked fridge in my kitchen. Food was never scarce in my family and I have many happy memories experimenting in the kitchen as my mom taught me to cook and prepare food. Every Saturday during the summer was marked by a trip to our local farmers market where I began to attach faces and names with the food my family and I ate. This, along with stories of my father's childhood spent on a pig farm, led to an early understanding that food didn't simply appear in the supermarket, but involved the labor of actual human beings to produce.
ReplyDeleteWhen I started volunteering at a local food pantry in middle school, I realized the relationship I had to food was not the same as many members in my community. Many clients at the pantry were migrant farm workers who contributed incredible amounts of labor to food production while simultaneously struggling to feed their families. While I was proud of the work the food pantry was doing to feed these folks experiencing food insecurity, I struggled to understand the bigger systems that created such vast inequality. My sociology classes at K gave me the knowledge and vocabulary to articulate the kinds of inequalities I saw in my hometown. While I am still trying to negotiate and figure out my place in contributing to solutions to food injustice and inequity, I am looking forward to this class and the interesting conversations that I am sure will arise.
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ReplyDeleteMy early relationship to growing was two-fold. On one end of the spectrum of scale, I spent yearly family reunions in seemingly endless corn and soybean fields in Schoolcraft, Michigan; my cousins and I would jump rows as we joked that, between our three uncles, their plots covered half of the small town. Yet, for most of the year at home, I could see the limits of our small backyard garden from my bedroom window; my mother, the daughter of an avid gardener, grew strawberries, vegetables, and always too much mint and chives for one family to consume. In both circumstances, farming was familial.
ReplyDeleteIn late high school and in my first-year seminar, I was exposed to the politics of food and food production. I wrote a research paper on on food deserts and learned of the erasure of small farms in lieu of industrialized agriculture. My study abroad experience in Thailand heightened my attention to the existence of marginalizing power dynamics between farmers and the suppliers of agricultural inputs.
At this point, the guilt of my own family's role in the industrial agriculture "machine" and the privilege of the ability to access food on my own property lingers when I asses my relationship to food, farming, and community. Solutions are difficult to imagine, but a problem is clear. Our relationships to the earth and to each other are flawed; power to grow the food that sustains our bodies and traditions is concentrated, not shared.
When I was younger I didn't have much exposure to agriculture other than a small home garden and a loose family friend connection to a community garden. We visited the farmer's market in town once a week and my parents told me that the food we got there was better but I did not understand why. As I grew I learned most of what I know about big agriculture and it's dangers from my schooling. This was further reinforced with my study abroad experience in Thailand where we learned about how small farmers struggled with big agriculture.
ReplyDeleteRecently I had an interesting experience with big agriculture. I am starting an insect farm that we plan on keeping to a small and local affair. A major player in the entomophagy movement got in touch with us and scolded us about how we were planning on moving forward and tried to push a big agriculture theory on us saying that we want to locate or farm centrally so we could distribute easier. This almost completely goes against our model and what appears to be the model of most insect farms in North America now. This scared me as it hints at a dark possible future for the industry that I want to enter in that it seems that some want to follow in the footsteps of "traditional" agriculture.
“Food has culture, food has history.” Winona speaks of this in her introduction to explaining our relationship to food and it reflects well of my childhood and my own relationship to food. My childhood consisted of watching my parents attempt to master Argentinian barbeque using beef grown in the United States and never being able to get it to taste just right.
ReplyDeleteBoth of my parents grew up in the soy fields of Santa Fe, Argentina where fresh produce was sold on the corner of every street along with a butcher shop. My sister and I caught glimpses of this every time we went to visit our family but were often eating processed meat and the easiest recipes my parents could get their hands on back home in the States. It wasn’t until my first year at Kalamazoo College that I began to think about where my food was coming from in Michigan and learning about meat production in our country. I came home to my parents during winter break wagging my finger and explaining that we needed to start investing in grass fed beef. My father often rolled his eyes and explained that it still wouldn’t taste the same and we couldn’t afford it. While I know this class will dig deep into topics aside from meet production I am looking forward to learning about community farming and where I can place myself in those types of environments.
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ReplyDeleteI did not think much about food production as a child, however when I did it was in reference to my two of my favorite movies/books, both about small farms, Charlotte’s Web and Babe. Those movies introduced to me the pressures of keeping a small farm going as well as to how the push for large farms was threatening the small family farm. I always had negative associations with the term “factory farm,” but it was mostly because I understood them to be threatening the happiness of my favorite characters in my favorite movies. As I got older, I developed a greater understanding of what a factory farm is and specifically the negative treatment of animals on them. I found it upsetting to think about and so in some ways I disengaged from conversations surrounding the our food system because they made me feel powerless. Now though I feel ready to engage in these conversations and feel it is part of my duty as a human being. This renewed interest was in part spurred by a more selfish desire to cure the great digestional issues I began having. I still have great gaps of knowledge about food production, which is why I am in this class. I would like to learn more about why there was a push for big farms and also the impact and resistance the push spurred.
ReplyDeleteBefore I end I would like to say I completely agree that “the biggest problem in our current food system... resides within our relationships—our relationships with ourselves, each other, and the non-human beings who sustain our lives.” I feel that how we relate to each other, dehumanize others and detach ourselves from that which gives us life promotes violence. Violence against the earth and violence against each other. Here is one key space I see my work on campus as a member of S3A, and thus someone dedicated to ending sexual and relationship violence, intersecting with food justice. I would like to explore more throughout the course how these two issues relate and how answers to each problem can be found within each other.
I grew up in a small town countryside of South Korea. My house was located in the hillside of the town. The back of the house was surrounded by trees. My family did not own any farm animals but dogs. I remember there several different types of fruit trees like persimmon, wild cherries, and apricot. There was a small garden for vegetables. Food was always easily accessible to me and it could be anything like wild dandelions or spring greens around my house. I remember gathering wild herbs and my grandmother made a soup with fresh vegetables.
ReplyDeleteIt was when I moved to America when I started to see some ethical problems within the agricultural systems. I had a discussion about the company, Tyson, and its brutal treatments towards animals. The environment where chickens live is not proper and creates stress, and eventually they get killed. Another interesting thing that Tyson does is that it hires around 100 chaplains supporting those who work in cleansing and gutting thousands of chickens a week. They are the chains of support for mostly immigrant workers who encounter the inevitable dilemma of killing animals. I guess the chaplains can temporarily comfort the workers, but it is more complicated than that. Obviously, this program has a huge marketing effect that attracts customers. It also created the company a better image; it disguises animal and environmental abuse that Tyson has committed. I'd like to discuss about it in the class and search more about it to understand this issue better.
I was raised in Newton, Massachusetts, a city of 80,000 that’s 10 miles west of Boston. My family was always food-secure, I never really had to worry about whether we had enough money for food growing up; both money and food were things we just had (and that, I’m sure I assumed growing up, most people had easy access to). Our house, like many in Newton, has front and back yards of mostly grass, some bushes, and, in our backyard, a few tall trees. I had access to a good grocery store–just a 5-minute walk (or 2-minute drive) from my house–and my immediate family food culture (if one can place the word culture on such a small community) emphasized fruits and vegetables, and a mix of healthy and less healthy snacks. My parents (mostly mom) cooked dinner most nights, and we ate together consistantly when I was growing up. The most meals we ate together that I am most nostalgic for when I can’t go back home for them are Chanukah dinners of latkes and applesauce, and Thanksgiving, with a variety of fairly predictable Thanksgiving food. I always enjoyed being outside but didn’t think too much about growing food until high school, when I started to realize I might enjoy not just being but working outside, learned a bit about food justice, and started to seek out more knowledge on my own. I can’t remember a specific moment of realization that “something was amiss” but as I learned about food and agriculture I was simultaneously starting to think more critically about race (and racism, and my own whiteness), gender (and sexism, cisexism, and my own gender identity and expression), sexuality (and heterosexism, and my own sexuality), class (and my family’s financially comfortable upper middle class identity and access to certain sorts of resources), and various other “big” categories of social identity. For me, the overlaps of these myriad identity categories render them inextricable, coexistant, and I believe that to address what may seem to be one singular issue, actually– necessarily– means to bring (all of the) others into play. For example, I owe my access growing up to a nearby and decent grocery store to the fact that my parents had access to Newton when they were looking to buy a house twenty-two years ago; their access came largely from money my mom inherited that allowed them to put a down payment on a house, and also from the fact of their being welcomed into the neighborhood–not just by neighbors, but by realtors and the housing market in general. They lived in Boston and Somerville before coming to Newton, and being white, did not face (in fact may have tacitly benefited from) discriminatory banking practices and racist housing policies like redlining, which for years marked–officially designated–neighborhoods as “good” (read: wealthy, white) and “bad” (read: low-income, of color). This is just one example, among many, of the interwoven nature of this all. At this point in my own life, I try to prioritize community, and when I can, I make food a part of that. I’ve interacted with food systems in various ways since coming to college; teaching kids about healthy food, working summer farm jobs, and organizing food-related events with Farms to K. What I keep finding is that my passion really lies in the experience of farming itself; working with other people and with the soil, the earth, to grow and nurture living things.
ReplyDeleteAmy's descrition of her childhood sounds much like my own. Growing up on a farm with both livestock (species most often determined by the latest interests of my four brothers and I, or by our 4-H companions) and a few hundred acres of growth. While our primary farming income came from and continues to come from conventionally grown (think RoundUp Ready corn and soy beans), we also worked to maintain some forty acres of woodlot, to clear and dig out a pond that became a wonderful swimming place, and generally afforded each of us a great deal of independence and adventure. Whether this meant hunting and fishing, riding horses and spending days in the barn "talking with them" or just getting lost out of eyesight, we were frequently reminded that these were privileges made possible only by assuming a mass of responsibility that our schoolmates and peers wouldn't be familiar with. These same peers seemed equally unfamiliar (or repulsed by) the "facts of life" on a farm, and the duty to respect and act as a steward to the lives in our control. I was also more aware of a changing dynamic in agriculture than I perceived my peers to be. From an early age I was conscious that something was amiss in the farming community, as my father came home from our feed mill, put his head on our kitchen counter, and lamented the business - his stress arose from its shift from livestock and farm supply to more lawn and garden based products, mirroring the expansion of our village into a paved and "beautified" little city. I was aware of this disconnect as I saw so many of our neighbors unable to continue as mid-sized farmers, squeezed out between the pressure to always be bigger and the greenwashing perspective of a public culture unwilling to embrace sustainable production before them in lieu of a pre-packaged and unrecognizable offering. Where those farms stood are now parcels, a few of which house families taking a genuine stab at agriculture (and very often telephoning my mother in the middle of the evening for help with calving or another livestock emergency) - but most are there to "escape the city," to build mansions that abstract my idea of a bucolic countryside. The fact that these farmers have encouraged their next generation to leave agriculture behind is fact enough that something is awry. Nonetheless, it took me leaving for college (where my tuition bill gets paid after the bean market gets a little uptick each term) to more closely examine the practices we were supporting by farming using certain seeds and practices. In my freshman seminar I discovered the Seed Sovereignty movement in India, a pushback of seed savers responding to the crippling debt caused by patented gene technology by companies that control our agricultural models as well. Despite my conflict in this arena, I can't help but feel that I am straddling worlds. My true love of vegetables and interest in growing them in a sustainable way came not from this research but from the privilege of having a flourishing garden (my mother has a botany degree and ran the greenhouse at our mill) and a love of cooking, and discovering that the two went quite well together. Moving forward, I became interested in other culture's approaches to food, the practices of making it and a generally stronger connectedness to the production methods than that which we see here in the US, and questioning how these systems arose and how to combat them. While social justice entered the picture here at K, this process began out of a selfish interest to see more green spaces able to sustain a livelihood, and to experience food that was both healthy and delicious.
ReplyDeleteI grew up in a very small town in Arkansas surrounded by miles and miles of forest. Our neighborhood was connected solely by this one long road that led to the “downtown” area. But anywho, my aunt’s house was home and I was raised right along with the chickens, geese, dogs and cats that all ran freely about our land. It’s funny, I never considered our fields as land, until recently someone asked me if my aunt owned land in Arkansas. I have always just thought of our fields as my big backyard. I still remember everything so vividly, but when I moved to the big city, my forest greens were traded for hues of gray and charcoal. I never thought about food until I moved to Los Angeles, where there never was leftovers. Before my family was ever even able to ask the question, should I buy organic tomatoes or GMO tomatoes, they were asking do we even have enough money to buy any tomatoes. I believe this same question is what many families who are on or below the poverty line ask themselves everyday. It’s not a choice, but a matter of necessity. It wasn’t until we had the resources, that we began to question our food and its ramifications on our bodies and ultimately, society.
ReplyDeleteThroughout my life, food, like most things necessary for survival, has been readily available to me. My family worked hard to create the ability for me to have what I wanted, when I wanted it, regardless of whether or not I needed it. It was only when I was a senior in high school that I realized food was not anything edible I could get my hands on, but was meant to serve as fuel for the body to do its bodily things. That year, I encouraged my family to eat more healthily and get more exercise. The choices that I made during this time were, for the most part, choices that truly nourished me, and I was strong and warm and alive in my skin; I didn’t feel the need to look into any more of the issues surrounding food because I didn’t need additional incentive to be eating better – so I thought. College, especially my time abroad, brought with it an unstoppable avalanche of alarm and terror surrounding the food industries of the world. I remember being told that we, as a species and with our greed, had already irreversibly altered the course of all life on Earth. This hopeless thought (and the daily news stories seeming only to drive its point home), coupled with the demanding, fast-paced world of Kollege was the perfect breeding ground for someone with traditionally self-serving tendencies to revert back to her original view of food as comfort and something she was always entitled to. I lost the ground I had gained before I even began to scratch the surface of where you or Ms. LaDuke are in your individual relationships with food.
ReplyDeleteSo! I’m so thrilled to be taking a course that breaks such scary, overwhelming concerns down into pieces I can tackle, because I really do want to cultivate a meaningful, respectful relationship with food. Over these past few weeks, I have found myself considering my meals in some capacity every time I eat, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s definitely the best place to begin this life-long journey.