Dear FoodWorks Fellows,
It’s been very exciting to interview Fellows in Middlebury and Washington, to accompany a Fifth-Day outing from each of those sites, and to see the launch of our blog after some brief glitches with the technology. I’m eager to have some time with everyone in Louisville when I’m down there week after next.
The blog is off to an excellent start. What feels especially good, right off the bat, is most posts’ specificity and strong interpretive stance on the readings. I would like to encourage everyone to read around a bit on the blog and enjoy the energy of this conversation. I am doing so, and often making brief comments at the bottom of particular posts. I hope to make a written response to every Fellow within every two weeks, and in that way to extend our personal conversations.
The blog is a stand-in for what would be our regular class-meetings if we were all on one campus. It will be a motor for the connections we draw, individually and collectively, between the internships and the readings. Here are three suggestions to consider as we try to build on what has already been accomplished: 1) feel free to bring in personal examples; such an example might be holding your own great-grandmothers’ food-histories up to Pollan’s reference to his own great-grandmother in his Food Manifesto, as several people’s posts in fact did; 2) offer direct connections beween your own responses to the readings, those of other Fellows’ posts, and experiences on the Fifth Days; and 3) quote directly when citing a reading, so that your interpretation can be even more pointed. Again, though, these would simply build upon ways in which our blog is already working well.
Starting on Saturday, four people a week will post video interviews with members of their summer food communities. These might well be people you work with or have met through your internships. I’ll be traveling most of the day tomorrow, but I’m sure the Coordinators or other Fellows would be happy to help you think about productive approaches. If you go for about a 5-minute interview, you should be able to edit it down to about 2 minutes before posting. As previously indicated, Fredy and Grace in DC, Yingshi in KY, and Charlie in VT are up for Saturday. Working down my non-alphabetized rosters, I’d like to invite Armon in DC, Raphaelle in KY, and Emma and Dor in VT to post for the 20th.
Best,
John
P. S. When you’ve finished a post please remember to click “Readings” under “Categories,” to the right, so that what you’ve written will show up for others.