Reading the Wendell Berry piece for this week, in which Andy Catlett tells a story about watching his grandmother make pie, was interesting to me in what it said about cooking as a way to relate to one another. In the piece, Catlett explains how his grandmother talked while she cooked, updating him on the latest news from the family, and how he followed her around and listened intently. Through spending time with his grandmother as she cooks, he becomes closer to her and closer to his family, demonstrating how cooking can help individuals connect to one another. We’ve talked about food and community a lot in this class, and this piece was interesting to me because it seemed to describe a different process of creating connection through food, one that seems more relevant to me and my internship this summer than our discussions of eating local or food justice.

In general, I’ve been working two days a week at the Parent-Child Center in the town of Middlebury, an organization that works with families and children, especially young mothers and their children. I work in the kitchen with some young women who participate in the job training program, as well as whoever is our supervisor for the day. I spend most of my time helping with basic food prep by cutting vegetables or preparing food to send to the childcare rooms, or washing the dishes from the childcare rooms after everyone has eaten. I’ve really enjoyed the work environment because of how much the kitchen seems to be a space in which community is built. The women with whom I work are constantly sharing and comparing stories about the growth of their children and how they’re adjusting to new schools and new summer schedules, and how they themselves are doing in their relationships with husbands and boyfriends. Throughout the day, the women share words of support about how they handled similar situations, or make plans to share time and resources outside of the kitchen once work is over. It’s been interesting to see just how well the women know each other and their families, for instance when every meal is considered for allergies or diet preferences. They seem to carry around long and detailed mental lists of who can eat what, down to whether each child drinks whole or 1% milk. Additionally, at the beginning of each day when we look at the schedule to see what lunch will be for that day, the items on the menu often prompt funny stories involving the women’s families.

In Andy Catlett’s story, his grandmother is using mostly local ingredients and recipes that were probably handed down through the generations. While there has been some talk of how to increase the amount of local food used in the meals at the Parent-Child Center, my guess is that few ingredients are local, and Michael Pollan would not be please to hear that sometimes the meals include items that Berry’s grandmother certainly would not recognize as food (like today’s fishsticks). However, I think it’s important to recognize the small ways that people are connecting around food in order to better understand how the realities of our current food system compare to the huge goals that we’ve set for ourselves. For instance, budget concerns were the first thing mentioned at the suggestion of increasing local food. One of my questions about increasing local food would be the children’s response to new local vegetables, some of which may be unfamiliar. Overall, I appreciate the experience I’ve had at my internship because I’ve been able to see the community that can be formed in a kitchen, even when we have so far to go in terms of changing the way our society at large relates to food.