When I started this blog, I knew it would primarily (and most immediately) serve as a way to document a few of my experiences while wwoofing in the US. However, that is not to say that I have this blog purely to describe those past events. Instead, my little corner of the internets is meant to convey various food-related discoveries, questions, and challenges I encounter in whatever little corner of the physical world I actually inhabit. This being said, I must apologize for the four-month hiatus I have taken. The wonders and troubles and gears of our food system (conventional and otherwise) do not take such breaks, so there's no reason a blog about that system should. Food -- and the creation/consumption thereof -- is always going places.
In the past few months, I have as well. After wwoofing I returned with much doubt to my steadfast home for a mere four days before setting sail for the hinterland, i.e. the greater Charlotte area. I spent my summer as far away from food as possible, chasing middle schoolers around a college campus that was maintained precisely to keep people as far from the natural environment as possible. The contrast was killer. We're talking windows-can't-be-open, AC-must-be-on-all-the-time concrete jungle. I have never felt so mechanical in my life! At the same time, though, I couldn't help but notice how quickly I slipped back into old suburban habits -- some days I woke up groggily and didn't really think about what uses the land I was standing on could have had in previous decades. There were two main food-related perks of semi-living in that area -- one was the delightfully quaint Davidson Farmers' Market. The other is a wonderful, innovative non-profit with some really great ideas about how to get local food out in the greater metropolitan area. I spent a brief time volunteering with them on my days off, which was a welcome respite from the foreign rigors of nerd-camp life.
From Davidson I ventured to my present location -- the eclectic city of Somerville, Mass. After three months of questioning it over and over again, I flew up in mid-August to begin the solitary, studious life of a graduate student. The experience has been a thought-provoking one thus far. It definitely helps that I came under the auspice of studying food! Despite my reliable tendencies to Google the crap out of anything, I had no idea the opportunities the greater Boston area provides for those so food-inclined. There are obvious events and groups that come to mind: the acclaimed Food Project and Boston Local Food Festival, for instance. Other groups, though, fall under the radar. One in particular that I have to brag about is theMOVE. Though very young, this group gathers folks from all around Boston, shuttles them to one of a handful of farms for a day, and then gathers them around to realize what they've done. Which is become part of this enormous system that governs so much of our day-to-day existence. I've done two volunteer trips with theMOVE thus far and look forward to the next.
Sadly, a majority of my time here is not spent flitting from farm to farm, nor is it occupied with even producing my own meager garden of sorts. (Although, on that note -- urban agriculture is hard to do!) My program here in Somerville is probably the vaguest one I've ever heard of -- urban and environmental policy and planning. So what is it that that doesn't cover? Fo' serious. Truly, though -- it's a great, crunchy department that is everything I could possibly want out of a graduate program. The flexibility, creativity, and practicality it provides are fantastic. The question, of course, is whether a graduate program is really what I want/need at this point in my life. Ha! Never would I have imagined that farmwork would change my perspective so drastically. Given my natural edge for cynicism I can't help but wonder about the effectiveness of academia with something as field-based (ha) as agriculture, especially in light of some problems (like the unbearable whiteness of farming). How is sitting in a classroom with fifteen twenty-something white females who don't shave and drink out of mason jars going to create some sort of change for the American farmer? How am I, as the very similar demographic to these classmates, going to truly know what is going on in the life of a farmer and the life of his/her land if I'm not in the dirt tilling alongside him/her? I chose this program in large part for its practicality, but it is only as practical as a post-secondary conventional education can be.
So what do you do? What do I do? I'm contemplating how to gain the most from this point in my life -- and what a point it is, really. I have been itching to return to a farm from the moment I left Oregon. I feel like the dust from Tucson, the mud from Teal Creek, all the days and nights of picking and washing and seeding and watering have indelibly smeared themselves somewhere in my psyche. Somewhere in between all the poems I have ever read, all the songs I have ever heard, all the emotions I've ever felt is this deep, deep urge and connection to be outside and create, and I never knew it existed until a few months ago. Now I can't shake it off -- and I don't want to! At the same time, I'm here. I feel like I am a fairly experienced traveler, but this is a culture shock like I have never known. How do you take from this kind of experience and lead a life elsewhere? Why would you want to? These questions have been rattling around like dry beans in my brain for some time now, and I am as answerless as I was in March. I feel like those five months spent outside working were just the faintest beginning of something so much bigger -- and I want to know what. I want to adopt a natural mental calendar that runs in seasons, not semesters. I want to see the failures and successes of one year contrast with the next. I want to go back to a farm but forward into the future -- to spend significant time in one place, to stay long enough to see all the processes on the farm move to the process of the market move to the process of the home, to find where the justice lies (if anywhere) in what is so often described as an unjust system.
Ahh. The sweet, torturous process of one's 20s.
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