Author: Eliza Margolin

The definition of a weed is a plant growing where it is not wanted. That’s all. This means that what is and is not a weed varies across time and place. In fact, a plant may simultaneously be considered a weed and not a weed by two different people (or even two competing opinions in one person’s mind!) observing it at the same time and in the same place.

A lot of my time these days is spent weeding, so I have plenty of opportunities to contemplate this. For instance, lamb’s quarters are edible plants that show up in my gardens a lot. When small, their leaves are really soft and taste kind of like fresh peas. I always take them out, but isn’t it weird to remove an edible plant from a place designed to… grow edible plants?

Last week, I removed some volunteer tomatoes from a bed that was planted with squash. There, they were weeds. I moved them to an adjacent bed that had been planted with cucumbers but that was still half empty. There, they are a crop. Five feet west, and they are no longer weeds (to be removed and thrown away), but a valuable source of food (to be cultivated, harvested, and eaten). Phrased that way, transplanting is like a miracle. It makes food out of waste with almost no effort!

I want to diverge from the blog prompt. In the Q&A after Eric Holt-Gimenez’s talk at the UVM Food Summit, he mentioned the importance of confronting sexism and racism implicit in the environmental movement, and especially the food movement. This comment was one of two during the day that earned immediate applause from the audience (the other being a proposal that higher education should be free). I want to use this as a jumping-off point to bring up an issue that is inextricable from food studies, feminism, mental health advocacy, and youth empowerment: eating disorders.

If we’re going to talk about food, we have to talk really seriously about the fact that some people have deeply uncomfortable and unhealthy (and unsustainable – for their bodies) relationships to food. According to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders:

• 24 million Americans have an eating disorder. That’s around 7% of the general population.
• Only 10% of those with EDs seek treatment. Men are less likely than women to seek treatment. This is likely because it is seen as a feminine, and therefore less serious, problem that they should just be able to deal with on their own.
• 95% of those with EDs are between the age of 12 and 25.
• EDs have the highest mortality rate of any mental disorder.

And this one feels very relevant to my work this summer:

• Over 80% of 10-year-old girls are “afraid of being fat.”

My job includes working with kids, most of whom are in elementary school, and many of whom are girls. Just this morning, I weeded a garden with the help of two girls who are about to enter middle school. They have an unbelievable amount of pressure put on them to look and act in certain ways, at all times, from all angles. (Welcome to womanhood!) The wording of the phrase above really gets me – girls are afraid of being fat. This fear carries over to eating almost immediately. How can we hope to instill in anyone a love for growing and preparing and eating and loving food if they fear it?

All social issues are intertwined. We must, must, must confront sexism (not to mention the stigma surrounding mental health) if we are to get kids to love gardening and cooking. Girls can’t think it’ll make them fat (code for unattractive), and boys can’t think it’s girly (code for bad). But it goes so much deeper than that – girls shouldn’t think that being unattractive is a social death sentence, and boys shouldn’t think that the effeminate is inherently icky or unworthy of their attention. Thus: feminism. Boom.

If you’re interested in reading up more on EDs, check out the link above, in addition to the National Eating Disorders Association, National Institute of Mental Health, and Mayo Clinic’s page on the issue. For more on feminism, read bell hooks, Judith Butler, Audre Lorde, Eve Ensler… but most of all, keep your eyes open and be thoughtful and critical and respectful and for the love of god don’t tell a young girl not to eat too much at dinner.

“Be joyful/though you have considered all the facts.”

As others have written, the tension in this sentence makes it really rich for interrogation. I’m really interested in the way Berry elicits joy in his readers even as he presents cold hard facts – we’ve seen this in several of his pieces, both in the poem and in the collection of essays. I also am interested in one line preceding this one:

“Expect the end of the world. Laugh.”

For me, both of these lines speak to the power to be found in deriving happiness from less-than-ideal circumstances. It is easy to be happy when everything is going swimmingly, and it is easy to be discouraged when things get tough. It is more difficult and, sometimes, more rewarding to be happy when the world is working against you. Although all experiences are important (and it’s completely valid to be happy in happy times and sad in sad times), the richest emotion is to be found in the areas of contradiction. There is no worse feeling of alienation than when you are sad and those around you are all happy, and being truly optimistic in sad times is incredibly empowering.

I think this follows in the same line of thinking that came up in our discussion about complexity last week. Ecological edges are rich and complex and diverse and important and stressful and vulnerable and unique. These are all words I would use to describe these contradictory emotions, as well. I would argue that in every field, ecology and psychology included, it is important not to shy away from complexity and contradiction and paradox, but to coax them out as much as possible to understand the really complicated ideas at play in our world and our minds.