Dear FoodWorks Fellows and Other Friends,

As our summer’s adventure speeds to a close, I would like to share a few reflections about it with you–especially in regard to how the blog has worked and about our goals for the final videoconference.

It’s truly been a pleasure for me to be associated with such an ambitious and timely initiative as Middlebury FoodWorks. The quality and range of the internships, the creativity folks have brought to their engagements with them as well as with the course, and the level of collaboration among the excellent staff supporting this program have provided a rich context for our multi-site, hybrid course. It was a pleasure for me, too, to spend time with each of you at this summer’s three locales. Our individual conversations were essential complements to the central, unifying dialogue of our class: the blog.

I’ve now finished reading back over the entire blog, and want to share a few observations with you. One is that the overall quality improved dramatically over the first several weeks and then remained at that high level. Fellows generally did an excellent job of focusing on a noteworthy aspect of each week’s readings, responding to it in ways that often drew on personal experiences as well. As I’ve shared with you before, I believe that blogs are like conversations, in being exploratory and open-ended. They allow us to glimpse connections and implications that only become clear in the course of writing. The responses to each others’ posts toward the end of a given week, though usually quite a bit briefer, have served the valuable function of inviting you to scroll around in colleagues’ explorations and let them intertwine with your own.

I hope that you will find a way to keep going with this form of writing-for-discovery, whether in a blog, in a journal, or simply within the process of writing a particular essay. You can also view both your further readings and your conversations with colleagues in other settings as prompts for exploratory entries. In the future, when a more formal writing-project seems to founder, with a collision or a gap between important ideas within it, consider making that problem the starting point for an informal response. In my experience, such challenges can be places where your writing needs to go deeper. You all know my email address. Please feel free to contact me, even after our course is over, if you would like to be in dialogue about a writing issue or to send me a draft of some project for comments.

One piece of house-keeping: please check back over your own posts for the whole course at this point and make sure they were all correctly categorized and will thus show up in the final record. As we’ve found, that’s a technical requirement of WordPress that’s pretty easy to forget.

Our final videoconference will be from 9 0’clock until 11 on Friday, July 31st. I’m really looking forward to this opportunity to think about the past two months together. Each of our three teams will have submitted its revised digital story to Mack Pauly by 3 o’clock on Thursday the 30th, so that he can have them ready to show on the 31st. We’ll then watch and discuss the stories one at a time. (I’ll be in touch with Ariel, Mae, and Heather in order to see if your groups have strong preferences about what order we should go in.) Could each team please discuss among yourselves how you would like to introduce your digital story to the whole group? You could designate two or three folks to lead off in this way for a few minutes, then show the story itself. Afterwards, Fellows at other sites will make comments and ask questions, and this would be a good time for members of your team who didn’t participate in the introduction to make sure your voice is heard about the project too. People have invested a great deal of creativity in these digital stories. It should be lots of fun to look at them together.

After we’ve finished discussing all three stories we will have an opportunity for looking back over the course as a whole together. Here are some of the questions that might be especially interesting to pursue. How were your internships related to our readings? Did they reinforce each other? Tug your perspectives in different directions? Which posts on the blogs (either your own or others’) stick in your mind? Similarly, which Fifth Day experiences linger most vividly for you? Finally, how do you foresee this FoodWorks summer relating to your subsequent studies or vocations?

See you soon!

John

Good morning again, FoodWorks Fellows.

After some extremely productive conversations with Ariel, Mae, Heather, and Sophie, I have a clearer sense of how the remaining weeks of our course might productively shaped.

The syllabus initially left the readings for the weeks of July 13 and July 20 to be filled in, but I can tell you now that for the week of the 13th we’ll be looking at the selection of “Community Voices” which come up when you click on “Grassroots/Why Hunger dot org website” on our electronic-reserves page. These are dozens of little profiles (with outstanding photographs) of farmers. Though issues of food-security and justice certainly arise in their stories, the overall effect is of celebrating a visionary and inspiring group of people. Please read around widely in these pieces during the coming week and select one to focus on in your posts for next week’s blog. I found that once I started reading them it was like eating popcorn–impossible to stop before finishing them. In addition to being truly fascinating, these narratives of lives devoted to raising food also pulled together many of the themes we’ve been exploring together. Have fun!

Our last videoconference felt so productive that I explored fitting an additional such session into the schedule for next week. That won’t work, but the concluding videoconference of the class, on July 31 will still round off that aspect of our class as well as focus on the final digital stories.

Mae, Heather, Ariel and I share the same, evolving sense of how the digital stories might be approached. While FoodWorks Fellows at each site can definitely still choose to draw from some of the very interesting interviews folks have been posting each week, they can also decide to frame and produce new digital stories that convey themes and images particularly important to their summer’s experience. Aylie Baker is standing by online to offer feedback about technical, thematic, or aesthetic questions that may arise as people conceive of and produce these digital stories. Since these are ambitious culminating projects, we’ll allow the last two weeks of the class for work on them by our local teams. Therefore there will be no readings assigned for the week of July 20 and no expectation for blog-posts that week. The blog will remain up if anyone does want to add an entry.

I’m very excited about how our activities and conversations of the summer are finding their final shape, and hope that you are too.

John

Good morning, everyone.

I hope you enjoyed pleasant and relaxing weekends. We sat on our porch here in the village of Bristol as the annual Fourth of July parade passed by–including our local band seated on a flat-bed truck and a group of clowns clashing cymbals that also served as their hats.

My suggested prompt for your responses to the readings for this week is that you focus on the YouTube talks by Shiva or LaDuke or the excerpt from Nabhan in relation to our videoconference from Louisville. The question we began to explore about how local food relates to global food-security and fairness is one that each of these figures also addresses in illuminating ways.

Best, John

Good morning, everyone.

Hello FoodWorks Fellows and Friends,

I was really pleased by what folks at our three sites managed to accomplish in the first videoconference, and hope that you were too. Launching the discussion in any class is a complicated and important business, and when using a a new technology the balancing act is even more delicate. Despite various challenges we encountered with the screens and the sound, we prevailed in having a conversation that combined fairly wide participation with extended, probing discussions of Pollan and Petrini as well as the themes of sustainable cities and resilience. Special thanks are due to Ariel for her thoughtful framing of the conference’s second half.

Yesterday morning, while waiting for my flight back to Vermont from Dulles, I had an encouraging phone conversation with Mack Mackenzie, the IT specialist at Middlebury who’s overseeing the videoconferences. Several issues arose, and were dealt with, that I thought you would like knowing about as we look forward to our conferences this week and next. One had to do with the visual aspect of our connections among sites. We’re going to experiment with changing the arrangements of the tables (or doing without tables) and at the same time getting a closer view of each others’ faces. Mack told me something else of interest in this regard. Apparently the Middlebury Fellows were all clearly visible on their own screen, and in the recording he made of the entire videoconference. But in Washington we could only see part of that group. Mack has a good idea about out how to reconfigure the linkage so that the views are the same from all sites. As my Senator Bernie Sanders  likes to say, this would be “Yuge!”  Similarly, Mack has figured out a way to deaden feedback so that two of our sites do not have to be muted when someone from the third is speaking. He’ll be in touch with our Coordinators about how this can work. It will mean that we don’t have to depend exclusively on raised hands in order to see who’s got something to say.

You were all so intrepid about plunging into this technology that I wanted to share these plans for builiding on our first foray.  Just to remind you: the upcoming videoconference from Middlebury will begin with a panel discussion, followed in the second hour by a discussion related to food and climate-change that Mae Quilty will frame for us.

Wishing you all a refreshing and productive weekend,

John

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.

Hi again, everyone.

A couple of emails arrived from Fellows yesterday asking about how to enter their posts into the blog. I was grateful for this reminder that, in addition to my messages about the rationale and strategy of the blog in our class, some more details about the mechanics would have been useful! This summer’s attempt at a hybrid, multi-site course is definitely a shake-down cruise, and such feedback will be essential all summer.

Here are a few directions I hope will do the trick for you, so that by next week you won’t even need to think about them anymore.

1. Go to the blog. Here’s the URL: https://sites.middlebury.edu/exploringlocalfoodsystem/blog/ Just highlight this and paste it into the address-bar at the top of your computer screen. You can then bookmark it for easy access on future occasions.

2. Click the box for “sign in” at the upper right of the blog page and enter your name and Middlebury password, as provided to you earlier.

3. If you want to read my updates and prompts (as I hope you will on a regular basis!) click “Letters to Class.” But for your own posts go to “Responses to Readings.” At the top of the screen there’ll be a + mark and the word “New.” Click that.

4. A screen will open with space for a brief descriptive title and a blank page for your message. You can either write directly on that page (my general recommendation) or paste in a message previously composed in Word. Either way you can do basic editing right in this space. Don’t worry about underlining or italicizing.

5. When you think you may be finished you have several options, shown at the right of the screen. “Save Draft” will let you come back to work on it at a later time. “Preview” will let you see how your post would appear to readers; the look on the page becomes a bit different. “Publish” would go ahead and add this to the blog. You can still always return to edit published posts. (I just added an l to published misprint, “bog,” two sentences earlier.) After such editing, click the “Update” box to your right.

6. Here’s how you’ll respond to a colleague’s post toward the end of each week. (Reminder: this will be due on Friday this week instead of Thursday, because of the videoconference from D. C. on Thursday evening.) After reading the post you’ve chosen, go down to the bottom of the page and write your message in the box labeled “Leave a reply.” It will expand to offer as much space as you need.

I hope this gives you plenty to get started. Please don’t hesitate to ask further questions as the blog gets rolling. If you’re wondering about how something works, others probably are too.

Best,

John