One of my favorite memories from last fall semester is from one Sunday night, after our house meeting at Weybridge House, when I accompanied my friend Marissa to a farm just down the road to milk a cow. Marissa, two other friends, and I each took a turn sitting on the milking stool in a small red barn and milking Luna, a sweet brown Jersey cow. We milked into a metal pail and, after pouring the first milk into a bucket for Luna’s calf, poured the rest into large glass jars. Marissa stuck some of these jars into the refrigerator in the barn, and we all helped carry the remaining jars back to the car to take home with us to Weybridge. Back at the house, the milk went into the fridge and house members drank it as raw milk or used it to cook. Although I only visited Luna once or twice during the semester, Marissa went twice a week every week and always returned with raw milk for the house. I loved knowing exactly where the all milk in the refrigerator had come from (some from Kimball Brook, and the rest from Luna), and being able to connect it with the experience of trying to milk (getting the technique can be a real challenge for someone who doesn’t have experience milking a cow!).

This is the first thing that came to mind when I read the Community Voices post about Bob St. Peter, a farmer from Maine working on food sovereignty and market issues from the farmer’s perspective. His take on the government crack-down on raw milk operations was especially interesting to me, since despite the fact that no one drinking the raw milk in Weybridge ever faced health problems because of it, the question of food safety still pops into my mind and I have a hard time deciding how I feel about the product. In this sense, I understand how food sovereignty becomes a highly personal issue. For me, part of what makes the local food movement seem so important is the idea that we can feed ourselves, and in doing so rediscover trust within the food system. As a consumer, I was hesitant to drink the raw milk because the lack of government support for that kind of product made me question whether I could trust its safety. However, when I think about the issue more, I’m not sure it makes sense that I had a hard time trusting the raw milk from Luna, where I was able to see the cleanliness and health of the cow and the cleanliness and cleaning process of all the equipment, while I in general I don’t question the quality of milk that I buy at the grocery store. I understand there are many reasons why this is the case and that regulation by the FDA is in place so that consumers can go to the store without worrying about food safety issues, but my own experiences have also demonstrated to me the value in the cause that Bob St. Peter is fighting for.

In general, I found the piece on Bob St. Peter extremely interesting because after working on a vegetable farm last summer, I realized how much I loved the act of farming and working with the land. The fifth days this summer have made me question a lot about what farming entails, especially in relation to the marketing and economic sides of the work. I love how the article frames the food system issues in terms of being able to feed ourselves, because for me, eating the food that I had helped grow in the fields was one of the most rewarding parts of my work. I hope that I’ll be able to do the same kind of rewarding work again, both logistically and economically, and Bob St. Peter’s approach to changing the food system -from the producers perspective- seemed new and highly relevant to me because of this.

During one of the first weekends of the Foodworks program, I found myself in a car with three other fellows from the Middlebury site discussing my thoughts on GMOs. It was an interesting conversation, and one that all of us in the car contributed to in a slightly different way even though we all seemed to be generally against their use, at least when it came to food products. I think I first started to think critically about GMOs and their role in the food system in one of my environmental studies classes at Middlebury, and I remember feeling so frustrated because while watching the two teams of students debate, the anti-GMOs team used only one argument throughout their presentation: the argument that there were potential health risks, and more time was needed to determine if GMO foods could be safely consumed. I don’t know that there’s anything wrong with this argument, but watching Winona LaDuke’s TEDx talk on native peoples and seeds and life prompted me to think back to the many other reasons why the prevelance of GMOs in our food system may be harmful.

I found her examples of groups of native people that have resisted genetic modification and patenting of some of their staple crops extremely interesting, and important when thinking about the topic of GMO foods not in isolation, but in their connection to arguments about local versus global food production and consumption. One of the common arguments for the use of GMO crops is that given the world population and the rate at which it’s growing, genetic modification will be necessary in order for enough food to be produced to feed all the hungry mouths. This argument first ignores supply chains and distribution, since availability of food and accessibility to food are different things. But this argument also ignores the way that food is tied to a way of life and a culture and a place. LaDuke describes how, even in a place with poverty, high levels of health problems, and limited access to healthy food, people are turning away from GMOs, recognizing the harms they cause, and returning to old methods of food production. In these instances, like on her reservation, the global arguments for GMO foods ignore the local arguments that tie a specific food to a specific place, and genetic modification would interfere with the strong cultural meanings that accompany eating certain foods. For instance, the tarrow plant in Hawaii is views as an elder relative by their cosmo-genealogy, and genetic modification would destroy this familial relationship. By returning to work in their sugarbush, planting three new (or rather old!) varieties of corn, and harvesting different varieties of squashes that can last through a long winter, the community on LaDuke’s reservation is tapping into existing food sources that can both sustain them with their nutrients and with their ties to their ancestors and historical way of life.

In terms of fairness, then, one of the suggested prompts for this week’s response, I think it’s important to be extremely wary of GMO use in general, and slow with their introduction in new situations, so that any impacts they may have are carefully thought through. For farmers who have a relationship with their seeds, it’s unfair for genetic modification to take away their ability to save seeds between years, thus cutting important cultural ties. In terms of food security, LaDuke’s talk explains how food availability and the nutrition absorbed into the body are not the same, in the same way that food availability today and food availability in a world affected by climate change are not the same. In all these ways, the local, the cultural, and the non-genetically modified play an important role, and one that all of these week’s pieces prompted me to think about in more depth.

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.

I always struggle with the idea of changing a part of the system versus changing the whole, and this idea stuck out to me as a central theme of this week’s readings. Holt-Gímenez wrote that people and organizations working to change the current, broken food system “focus on one of two specific components…rather than the system as a whole” (p. 1). I agree with his argument completely, in that a broken system isn’t like a broken piece of machinery that can be fixed with the replacement of one part. The food system is more complex than that, with feedbacks and complicated histories and unintended consequences of policies that may initially seem straightforward.

This stood out to me in the example cited in Ammond, in which Salaam describes some challenges the WIC system, both because of the unanticipated problems with the policy, and the way that fixing these problems was targeted at the parts of the policy and not the food system as a whole. First, the contradictions between the fact that dairy products are large percentage of those offered to the WIC participants, among whom 20% are African-American, yet 75% of African-Americans are lactose intolerant, suggest that the food system is incredible complex and no policy can be successfully implemented without looking into its links with the rest of the food system (p. 9). This example seemed to affirm Holt-Gímenez’s idea that systems thinking can be the only effective thinking in the food movement. However, the solution to this problem was based around new recommendations for the WIC program in order to better aid the populations involved with the WIC problem, a solution that focuses on a part of the system and not the whole. For instance, this solution does not aim to solve food justice issues, or question why the percentage of African-Americans participating in the program is higher than the percentage of African-Americans in the general population.

I want to be clear that I’m not criticizing WIC or the solution that was implemented in this case, but that I think it serves as an example of both why systems thinking is important in the food system and how much of a practical challenge this poses. I think Holt-Gímenez would agree that this example shows the “useful work” that can be done while working only on parts of the larger food system (p. 3). However, my question for Holt-Gímenez is how he sees us bringing about a new food system, logistically and practically. How can a food activist effectively make changes while focusing on more than one or two specific components? Time and resources are limited, including human resources in terms of how many challenges a person or organization can take on at once. Because of this, I think Ammons (quoting Eva Clayton) best sums up the course of action that we must take: “there is a need to connect [small projects] an pockets of work in order to achieve the scale needed to gain visibility, acceptability, and traction” (p. 15). If organizations and individuals can connect to one another and share the work they do, in formats such as the Addison County Hunger Council meeting or the UVM Food Summit, both of which I was fortunate enough to attend, the small changes can add up and I hope we can start to practically make the system changes that we need.

 

Schlosser writes that “the whole experience of buying fast food has become so routine, so thoroughly unexceptional and mundane, it is now taken for granted, like brushing your teeth or stopping for a red light” (Fast Food Nation, p.3). I was blown away by the statistics he quoted in the introduction to Fast Food Nation, completely unaware of just how strong of a grip McDonald’s had over not only the food culture of the United States, but the economy, political decisions, and general “American” culture as well. This kind of cultural power is unbelievable, although his argument that “a nation’s diet can be more revealing than its art or literature” is something that immediately made sense to me in the context of his examples (p.3).

However, what stuck out to me the most about this week’s readings was the contrast between how I related to this description from Schlosser, detailing the fast food culture and products that are manufactured, not grown, and how I related to Bill McKibben’s descriptions of Middlebury College, Vermont country fairs, and even Kirk Webster’s delicious honey. The experience of buying fast food is largely unfamiliar to me, whereas I could personally relate to many of McKibben’s descriptions. I remember going to the Champlain Valley Fair as a child, usually within the first few days after opening so that my parents could admire the locally-grown vegetables entered in the competitions in the large, red farm barn. More recently, as recently as this morning, I’ve tasted the truly delicious honey produced by Kirk. Living in the local food house on campus has many perks, of which the spoonfuls of golden honey from one of Kirk’s thirty-pound buckets are much appreciated! I could relate to McKibben’s description of the joy in producing food, and his explanation of how beekeeping is highly skilled farm labor, very different from the unskilled work in fast food production. Reading the articles by Schlosser and McKibben back to back made me realize just how much my relationship to food has been shaped by both my parents’ refusal to buy fast food for my sister and I when I was a child, the accessibility of other food options in my Vermont community, and my experiences working on a vegetable farm.

Despite the fact that personally, I identified much more strongly with the experiences outlined in McKibben than in Schlosser, Schlosser’s main point that fast food represents a “distinctively American way of viewing the world” really struck home (p. 9). When I think of my own experiences with fast food, and McDonald’s in particular, I actually think of my semester abroad in Ecuador. I visited a McDonald’s more times while there, in a foreign country, that I ever had in the United States, because that was the go-to (along with Oreo’s, another unhealthy, packaged food) among the students I was studying with when we were homesick and needed something easy and familiar while adjusting to our new home. I think this is very telling, that fast food was, even for someone who had rarely eaten it in the US, the familiar, not only in terms of the actual food being served but also in the culture and customs surrounding the meal. The quick process of ordering at the counter was different from many of the other meals I ate in Ecuador, in which the whole family spent all afternoon preparing a meal and then eating together.

Taking all of these experiences and thoughts into consideration, I think first that Schlosser is right in how strongly fast food culture influences life in the United States today. I envy other countries with a food culture based around an educated consumer, or family meals, or local specialties, but McDonald’s influences many links in the food system, which in turn influence other areas of culture. However, I think McKibben’s piece offers us hope within this system through the story of Kirk and his production methods. He brings a personal, educated, skilled, and intentional attitude towards food production, very different from the minimum wage jobs that involve unskilled, repetitive labor and “manufacturing” flavors and scents versus growing food. Can we make this type of work, and/or the food products that result from it, more available to communities in the US? In comparison with Schlosser’s argument, my food experiences are the unusual, and I know issues of accessibility and food justice play a large role in this. So if we do can change these aspects of our food system, can we change our whole food culture, and the “distinctly American way of viewing the world” that it represents?

I love the idea that food has a story. That we, as consumers, should strive to know and have a personal connection with as many parts of that story as possible seems to be a common theme among the ideas of Michael Pollan, Wendell Berry, and Carlo Petrini. Really, it seems as though making positive changes in our current, broken food system is all about forming a relationship with food, a personal relationship in which we eat intentionally and deliberately. As Pollan explains, eliminating some of the links in the food chain between the field and our table allows us to form stronger connection with our food beyond eating as a mere act of survival. If we can “shake the hand that feeds us,” we benefit from so much more than good, clean, and fair food because the stories of our food can feed our mind and soul.

When thinking back on the stories that my food has offered me, I was immediately brought back to last summer, when I was interning and working on an organic vegetable farm up in northern Vermont. I spent the days in the field with the farm’s owners and the rest of the crew, and lived in the apartment above the farmers’ garage. It was a summer full of amazingly fresh vegetables and shared meals, but I remember one dinner in particular. It was after a long, hot day of work in the middle of July, and the heat of the day had faded into a stormy night. It was on a Thursday, I remember, because Thursday was yoga night. The farmers, Mary and Eric, had traded a CSA share with a local yoga instructor: she got a fresh basket of veggies each week, and in return, she taught free yoga classes to the farm crew once a week in the farm barn. This particular night, after stretching our muscles from a long day in the fields, Mary and Eric invited the farm crew across the street to their house for dinner.

I distinctly remember the feel of the warm kitchen, cozy and safe while the thunder crashed and the lightning flashed outside. I stood at the table slicing carrots, radishes, and cucumbers fresh from that day’s harvest, while Eric grilled burgers made from meat raised on Mary’s parents’ farm down the road. Mary tended to her baby daughter, and she alternated with the other two women on the farm crew as we sliced veggies for the burgers and ripped lettuce for a green salad. When the burgers were cooked through, we all sat and ate together around the wooden kitchen table. Even the baby in her highchair sat with us to enjoy the company and parts of the shared meal.

This food had a story that was complex and juicy. It was the story of the farmers, who loved to pull pranks on each other to get us all laughing during the long days of work. It was the story of a beautiful tomato house, which by some stroke of luck stayed free of hornworms for the entire summer, and the story of the many lettuce plants which were not so lucky in avoiding the deer. It was the story of the many challenges and benefits to organic vegetable production, and the communal cooking that happened between a farm family and wonderful friends. It was the story, too, of a farm community that was willing to trade CSA shares for yoga lessons and rented port-a-potties. And for me, it was the story of a farm intern, happy not to be cooking alone in my apartment after a hot day of work.

I do realize that, as wonderful as this story was for me, it by no means occurs in the context of a perfect food system. I can’t write about the personal connection I had to the (in all probability) industrial workers who made the hamburger buns, or the farmers who grew the wheat. And I know that migrant workers in neighboring counties, who play an important role in producing local milk, are fighting hard for food justice and their rights. Nonetheless, I do think there’s room for hope and optimism. Maybe it’s because I’ve lived in Vermont my entire life in a community that seems to generally have respect for farmers, or because I’ve learned of some of the programs that exist here to distribute their food to low-income families. Or maybe I’m biased because my current answer when asked about post-college plans is to say that I want to work on a farm, so I have to believe there’s a chance to do it right. Regardless, my own experiences have shown me that, while there’s so much room for improvement, there’s room for hope, too, and we can use our own food stories to start a conversation.