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“Be joyful/though you have considered all the facts.” Considering this quote, I find a release in them. This quote makes me think of  life. For example, during the academic year, we all have a lot of works. I know the facts that I have to do homework even though I do not enjoy the class or the homework is really tough, long, and boring. But we have to force ourselves to love, enjoy, and get it going by being positive about it. I try to find the benefits of the subject and think that I will learn a lot from doing the homework. Therefore, I can enjoy the class and have fun with it. Classroom can be fun when we think of it as an laboratory; we can do the experiment there and see the result at the end. So enjoy the experiment!

At Middlebury, I adopted these practices to think positively about the class and enjoy it. I tried my best in the class and accepted whatever results turned out. Even though the results were not as great as I would like it to be, I think I have learned something from the class and I definitely will improve myself in the future. Just forget about the past and focus in the present.

For the next two months, I know that I have to deal with both stuff that I like and I don’t like, but I should be optimistic. For instance, I know that some days I have to pull weeds all day long, which is a boring and tolerance-needed stuff. However, when I see my garden looks beautiful and my plants grow well, I satisfy in the effort that I have put in. Moreover, not only me but also other people in the school will be delightful to see a nice garden and they are able to get the fresh produce right from the garden. Finally all of us are happy for the result. 🙂

“Be joyful/though you have considered all the facts.”
This line from Wendell Berry’s poem not only offered a sense of relief by mentioning the possibility to find joy amongst fact, but it also conveyed the somewhat disheartening realization that fact does not always (or even mostly?) lead to joyfulness. Ideally, I like to think that being exposed to and learning new facts would make one happy (because learning is supposed to be fun, right?). However, thinking about some of the facts that I’ve learned over the course of my existence, the ones that don’t provide joy, the ones that make hope and happiness feel unattainable, seem to stick. After all, how can someone be happy knowing that the icebergs are melting too quickly and polar bears are dying? Would that make us socially irresponsible people? Berry demands, in that particular line of his manifesto, that people should learn the facts and contemplate them, yet remain joyful. How does one remain joyful? Maybe partly, at least to start, joy from fact can be obtained by considering facts that provide happiness rather than sadness. Little tiny seeds grow into delicious vegetables. Fish’s gills extract oxygen from water so that they can live. Life is pretty unbelievable. Then maybe by internalizing some of life’s incredible facts, we can learn to be joyful as we consider all the facts.
I truly wish Wendell Berry had given a suggestion on how to comply to his command.

After reading this line, I find a feeling of tension. It reminds me of another saying about how the truth hurts. In our readings, I’ve found some of the things that I am learning about in regards to food very shocking. I did not know how food and the distance it travels had an effect on our well-being and health. What I mean by this is that Berry talks about how industrial agriculture now replaces people with machines and how we depend on fossil fuels to create and transport food to our plates on page 63. I have never really thought about food and people not farming as a loss of a skill that can be liberating and healthy. In our modern day and age, we are always talking about creating new jobs, new green jobs, and I wonder what it would be like to reimagine/recreate jobs that we have always needed such as farming, and created modern farming? What would that look like? Could we create technology that could keep farms close to us and food close to us? Would that mean figuring out how to put more gardens in cities? Could that mean creating a watering system that could water our plants depending on the weather and time of the day so that we can also be pursuing other interests such as computers or art? After all, we do need farms and growers in order to get food. So yes, I am joyful because I know that there is food in the world, but after learning some more facts, it is both disheartening and hopeful knowing that there is a growing concern for how we are getting our food.

In my work thus far, I have found it very liberating knowing all of the care that goes into growing and harvesting food. I love strawberries, and I recently learned about how they are harvested and how they are sold. That to me is a joy… knowing how the care and work that brought my food to me.

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

I haven’t started my internship or my stay in Weybridge yet, so the hills and farmland of Middlebury still seem like a different planet from my DC suburban neighborhood where food from all over the world is consumed happily and easily.

Even so, I have been trying to read up on national poverty and hunger to give myself a macro view of the micro problems that likely await me at the Charter House this summer. Though such reading has been interesting and has kept my brain from atrophying over the past few weeks, the material has also saddened me. Many of the pieces take an academic view that debate the Bureau of Labor Statistic’s metrics used to calculate the poverty rate, or they explore the real standard of living for the poor to show that they aren’t struggling as much as most people think. The underlying question: Who is poor? Who needs help and who deserves help? If your income is above a certain level (about $23,000 per household), does the system cast you off as not poor enough?

In the forest of numbers too large for me to grasp (who can visualize 45 million Americans in poverty?), I realized that trying to get a handle on the “facts” was making me forget that I am about to be dealing with real individuals who are struggling with hunger and rural poverty. I can read up on all the academic analyses of systemic poverty in the library, but I doubt it will make me a more effective friend and meal preparer for Charter House inhabitants this summer. At what point do I ignore the big picture, Wendell Berry’s “facts,” and focus on my daily encounters with real people? Eventually I hope to meld the sterile national perspective with my up-close-and-personal experience, but do not think I am there yet.

One of the feelings I struggled with during our discussion last Sunday was an overwhelming sense that I had no idea where to begin solving the problems that Berry outlines in his book. In “Conservationist and Agrarian” Berry discusses the incredible power that “land-exploiting corporations” hold over American culture and life (public schools, politics, etc.), articulating the inextricable links between everything. So…I found that the more I thought about it, the more tangled the predicament became. When I returned to the text, though, Berry’s essays quelled some of my frustrations. He manages to outline the problems he sees and also offers solutions, rather than seeming fatalistic. I find that this feeling relates directly to the quotation around which we are basing our thoughts: “Be joyful/though you have considered all the facts.” It reminds the reader to remain optimistic in the face of situations and facts that persuade him to be otherwise. One day this week my supervisor took me to a section of the arboretum where I’m working. There they had planted a new cypress swamp to replace one that had been logged in the past. The trees are still very young and I asked how long it would take until the cypresses were as big as they would in an older swamp. He said it would take at least one hundred years… I vocalized my disappointment that I would not be alive to see them. He told me that though it was sad, we cannot allow ourselves to be stopped by what lies before us or how long it takes to replace and fix. If we never act, then nothing will ever change.

Elizabeth, you mentioned “Food, Inc.” and that some farmers felt as though the movie attacked them. It made me think about how important it is an any movement to understand the consequences and fragility of bringing people into a conflict or movement when they may not wish to be a part of it. For many farmers their contracts with bigger companies and the way that our food economy is set up make it difficult to even churn out a sustainable living, so how can one ask them to put what they have in danger by becoming an activist? When someone is focused on surviving, is it fair to ask them to put themselves directly in the line of fire?

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

I think that this is one of the hardest things, but often overlooked. This fall I took a human ecology course, and I became aware of so many problems, problems that had I never thought about before. Things like the problem with foreign aid programs, conservation projects that displace people, and the basic capitalist system. I was glad to become aware of all these things, but it was hard to look at my place within it all, or even just the scenery around me. When I talked to people sometimes I would wonder how they could be so happy when the make up of the world was in such disrepair.

I was also taking a photography class and it was hard to compare the two. Sometimes I felt like my photography class was so unconnected from the world and all the complicated things I was learning about, but I found that taking pictures made me happy. And I realized that having something I enjoy doing makes me think about problems in a different way; I think about how I can change things while doing things that I enjoy. And I think people finding solutions to problems through doing something they love is the best way to change things (I guess that means I should hope that there aren’t many people who truly enjoy drilling for oil.)

The quote does make me feel a release. It gives us worried people permission to step away from our worries to feel joy, but then to look back at them with a new view. We shouldn’t feel guilty for the beautiful things, we should feel grateful. And then use that grace to make change. And what if those joys come from the small things? Then save the small things. I think people can’t enact change if they are miserable.

Welcome FoodWorks Fellows to your summer of learning about and exploring food systems. The FoodWorks Team has been working hard to organize a fulfilling program of 5^th day field trips, guest lectures and video conferences. In preparation for Orientation on Sunday, please be sure to have read “Bringing It To the Table” Introduction, Chap 1: Nature as Measure 3-10, Chap 2: Stupidity in Concentration 11-18, Chap 3: Agricultural Solutions for Agricultural Problems 19-30 AND Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front   (Poem by Wendell Berry)  http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/manifesto-the-mad-farmer-liberation-front/.

We will kick-off the program with a video conference between the Louisville and Middlebury sites at 2 pm, led by John Elder.

Take a look around the blog to see bios of your fellow FoodWorks fellows, current events and articles relating to the food system under Readings and Resources, as well as an updated Calendar. We are looking forward to this summer!