Journal Entry 10/12
Rachel Slocum’s article was profound to me: this article as well as the other readings provide me with a foundation for the work I am hoping to get into post-college. The questions she poses to the prospective non-profit organizers are the types of questions that are incredibly important, yet they are the questions that are typically not even addressed in this line of work.
I have spent two summers working with an extremely distressed community, New Bedford. Working with the predominantly Latino and Black children of the community, I felt exposed to something that I had never stumbled upon before in my experience as a teacher.
When I had worked in predominately white upper-middle class Ipswich, I was working with children who have never seen racism. The children of color in that community were treated equally, maybe with fascination at times because of the novelty of their skin, but otherwise, the children shared similar economic experiences and the same quality education.
The New Bedford children, on the other hand, were certainly more aware of the forces working against them. They didn’t trust their teachers (mostly Portuguese immigrants) who would forbid them from speaking Spanish in school despite speaking only in Portuguese to each other. They didn’t trust their curriculum, which blamed them for their low rankings, and instructed them to believe that education is entirely standardized and not designed to keep interest, but instead to achieve score standards designed for the dominant culture. They didn’t trust their parents, who fell victim to drugs deliberately circulating in their community as yet another method of oppression; parents who instill values of gang membership and loyalty, money-making schemes (I met one fifth grader employed by his father to push drugs onto his peers at school), depression and self-degradation (many young girls I met had family members and friends who were prostitutes), and low self-esteem and self-expectation (to my question “What age do you think is appropriate to have children?” I was met with the common answer “15”).
The experiences I had in this community inspired me to redirect my focus away from a purely environmentalist perspective towards an approach to making change via social justice work. But I hadn’t begun to flesh out the how-to aspect of this focus. Not until this semester, taking classes such as this one and a few other classes I am taking at this time on the topic of racism and white privilege.
I want to be able to leave this school with a well-formulated plan to bring back into that community and to create real change for the community by the community. These articles are a way for me to begin learning how to do this.
Journal Entry 10/19
Having worked as a teacher with young children and be it that I am intending on continuing in a career as an educator, the articles this week were especially important to my goals in integrating sustainability in the classroom.
Beyond the Garden showed me a thorough and logical way to infiltrate the ridiculous bureaucracies of the education system to encourage legitimate learning. I’ve been teaching for a while now. I’ve worked at the YMCA in Ipswich as an elementary ages art teacher as well as preschool teacher; a Montessori Preschool in Amherst; a YMCA in New Bedford as an art teacher; an out-source non-profit art program available to at-risk 5th graders in New Bedford; a non-profit art outreach program in New Bedford that visited different scheduled sites such as projects, parks, and summer programs. I have spent a lot of my time with youth and I have always sought to address issues such as sustainability too them.
Here, I have had many results. I’ve been disappointed at the lack of education and lack of caring about this topic with my kids in Ipswich (although I suspect that things there are different now, as in the last several years Ipswich has undergone a serious “greening” in all areas); I was surprised at the amount the preschoolers of UMASS faculty and students knew about climate change and local organic foods; and I was horrified about the ignorance imposed upon my New Bedford kids as a result of their poor quality education.
My New Bedford kids knew what school was about: School is about getting sufficient MCAS scores and nothing else. School is about humiliation and depression, about peer pressures and peer conflicts. School is a place to feel out of place, stupid, and insufferable.
I would try to tell them that this isn’t how it is everywhere, that some schools weren’t all about the MCAS, some teachers out there really wanted them to learn what is important to them, to their culture and their goals.
But what good is it to tell them about these great institutions and people when they aren’t an option for these children? I have thought a lot about how I can bring gardening experience to these kids like Nuestras Raices does in Holyoke. I’ve used art education as a tool to break down barriers of hate created in their community and to support self-confidence and to improve self-worth. I have talked to these children as people with beautiful ideas and valuable intelligences, not as a group to be pushed around and told what to do and punished when the scores aren’t good enough.
These kids so badly need an escape from the highly unjust No Child Left Behind act. I have not spoken to a single teacher who is in favor of this act that is destroying any interest a child may be able to experience in school. I have seen children learning from the practical application of art projects, and translating these skills into their other intelligences. I know for a fact that these children would benefit so much from school gardening and from learning more about self-sufficiency and sustainability.
But how do you instill values of learning that are the most beneficial from school when there are no teachers available to instruct and facilitate this learning? How can a school raise a garden when they receive less and less funding for the most basic things such as facilities and industrial food? How can a school produce healthy and versatile students when the schools are being built on dumping grounds permeating with PCB and other highly toxic agent? (*as is the case with New Bedford’s middle and high school, as they could afford no other space)
I think that the Farm to School program and these articles are detrimental to schooling. But how can schools that are treating children as less than people and are being allotted critically damaging funds hope to implement these programs?
This is the task I have given myself. It is my goal to achieve an education and to be able to bring what I learn to this area and give these children the education and tools for self-sufficiency and justice that they so dearly deserve, but have been robbed of by their federal government.
Monday, October 20, 2008
2 by Me
Fashion tips from Atlantis
You do look good in grey
And I don’t look bad in blue.
So I guess that this is just another highlight
For this thing.
I’ve taken the kitchen sink, the carpet, the desk, the cat.
You, though,
you have a DaVinci sprawl over the futon
a foot points to the mountains
another to the sea
An empire claiming dominance over an IKEA piece.
I stake out the couch in my fort of grief and blankets
I’ve claimed it tonight: It is mine tonight.
Tomorrow will bring new war.
Me, the aggressor, will charge at you there
I’ll trap you in a titanium Hercules grip
You will see what I see
Me, the victim, will lure you down into my sage hide
A salty place of seaweed and clams
My hurt is going to soak you
You will feel what I feel
You remain the agitator
You remain the instigator
A golden-haired Perseus, full of hope and stupid
You’re going home this time, after this war
But my binoculars are expensive, marvelous
In this division it is a wonder
what about partners?
Mama
With pale hands frail from her starvation,
She grasps desperately at her failing breath
It’s been awhile since she inhaled
She breathed in deep once, deep into her lungs
She breathed so deep once that she became full.
So round like that great mother Gaia-
a pregnant anticipation
- waiting for the rain to spill into her crooked places,
Seep down deep into the body of it all
She was made ready.
It’s been awhile since this was easy.
Back then, everything was in, out, in, out…
The breath came out quick, in spurts
It was so sustained, that breath
She could suck it all in with a gulp,
She could spit it all out with a sigh.
She had it figured out.
The ghosts of her limbs tremble like an aspen in winter
Gravity has proven a greater obstacle than expected
It’s still there: the fat infant gnawing at a shriveled breast
Heavy with awareness, it gnashes tiny teeth at her skin
now grey.
Plump fingers dig into places where once there was meat-
It leaves her torn and red.
She is milkless; it is hungry.
This long exhalation is coming to an end.
Her meager fingers reach for her chapped mouth;
Maybe she thinks she’ll pull the breath out
Out from the bruised lungs so crowded
by cracked bones.
Ice bone fingers grope inside her, into the drought.
Meanwhile, the infant wails.
You do look good in grey
And I don’t look bad in blue.
So I guess that this is just another highlight
For this thing.
I’ve taken the kitchen sink, the carpet, the desk, the cat.
You, though,
you have a DaVinci sprawl over the futon
a foot points to the mountains
another to the sea
An empire claiming dominance over an IKEA piece.
I stake out the couch in my fort of grief and blankets
I’ve claimed it tonight: It is mine tonight.
Tomorrow will bring new war.
Me, the aggressor, will charge at you there
I’ll trap you in a titanium Hercules grip
You will see what I see
Me, the victim, will lure you down into my sage hide
A salty place of seaweed and clams
My hurt is going to soak you
You will feel what I feel
You remain the agitator
You remain the instigator
A golden-haired Perseus, full of hope and stupid
You’re going home this time, after this war
But my binoculars are expensive, marvelous
In this division it is a wonder
what about partners?
Mama
With pale hands frail from her starvation,
She grasps desperately at her failing breath
It’s been awhile since she inhaled
She breathed in deep once, deep into her lungs
She breathed so deep once that she became full.
So round like that great mother Gaia-
a pregnant anticipation
- waiting for the rain to spill into her crooked places,
Seep down deep into the body of it all
She was made ready.
It’s been awhile since this was easy.
Back then, everything was in, out, in, out…
The breath came out quick, in spurts
It was so sustained, that breath
She could suck it all in with a gulp,
She could spit it all out with a sigh.
She had it figured out.
The ghosts of her limbs tremble like an aspen in winter
Gravity has proven a greater obstacle than expected
It’s still there: the fat infant gnawing at a shriveled breast
Heavy with awareness, it gnashes tiny teeth at her skin
now grey.
Plump fingers dig into places where once there was meat-
It leaves her torn and red.
She is milkless; it is hungry.
This long exhalation is coming to an end.
Her meager fingers reach for her chapped mouth;
Maybe she thinks she’ll pull the breath out
Out from the bruised lungs so crowded
by cracked bones.
Ice bone fingers grope inside her, into the drought.
Meanwhile, the infant wails.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
City Trees and a few quotes
One of mine and a few readings, thoughts, resources, and recommendations:
City Trees
A small calico girl
huddles under the meager shadow
of a dying honey locust.
(City trees are always dying.)
The slide is fried
The monkey bars burn
But there’s nothing else here
Home is close but
You can’t go there, no
Your noise wakes her up,
And damn near everyone knows
That she don’t wake up until
The sweaty heat has passed.
You, barely more than toddling,
Say this with such nonchalance
Such everyday normative regularity
Apathy I thought had to be learned
Apathy that is inherent to you
And if she’s locked up like
a Disney Princess
(except she would never be
a Disney Princess
not with skin so dark)
then who will remember you small,
calico child,
who will ever know about you?
Time flies, and next thing
you’re pregnant
An older child, alone on the schoolbus
Speaks of her mother:
“My ma, she can’t read and
this is just fine
she gots a job and
she got pregnant and
she got pregnant again and
this is just fine
she can’t read and
this is just fine”
And looking at you,
And looking at the rest of you
And by god, here in the north,
We were all innocent bystanders to that big civil mess, no never us,
Just a stones throw away
From the cradle of liberty
It’s like Will Simmons is laughing
While the President Wilson claps
At how amazingly profound
of a joke is being told
and better yet,
the dumb mouthed party
of the guffawing stupid
applauding how brilliant
this joke is.
And listening to you,
A calico child, a lonesome girl,
And knowing that you know
Just how sick the joke is
I feel nauseous.
But I pay the Klecktoken
And we all gather round
To read from the Kloran.
“In 1492, Columbus discovered America.”
“Slavery in the United States
ended in 1865.”
***
Memory and (comm)Unity: Black Liberation Poetry
“In a new world where African people were transported to labor, die, and disappear, we’ve needed unbound voices to reformulate our destiny—voices refusing to be ensnared by somebody else’s terms. … Listen to them, to ourselves, to the best we’ve managed to write and say and dance and paint and sing. African-American culture, in spite of the weight, the assaults it has endured, may contain a key to our nation’s survival, a key not found simply in the goal of material prosperity, but in the force of spirit, will, communal interdependence.”
-John Edgar Wideman
Not unlike the African Griots, the Surrealists or the Chicano poets, the practitioners of liberation poetry approach language with great suspicion. They know that any motivated social, religious, ideological or ethnic group can use and manipulate the attributes of a given language for its own agenda—and it usually works for the benefit of the most privileged… In this respect, poets as diverse as Gary Hicks, Mutaburuka or Jack Hirshman have manipulated the English language to say things other than what it was originally invented (and intended) to say: a discourse of disruption that goes overboard of both the confines of academic dogmas and the mystification of prejudiced truths.
- Un-poetic Manifesto of Liberation Poetry
Beauty is relative; its pretended universal splendor, as represented in the ruling classes’ standard of valor, is a fraud: its false transcendence is revealed, denounced and devalued by the not so endearing occurrences in practical reality.
- Un-poetic Manifesto of Liberation Poetry
Governments and political systems come and go, but people continue to live the dream of being with hope in a better tomorrow even in the middle of abysmal horror
- Un-poetic Manifesto of Liberation Poetry
A poet has no way of shaping and shifting such tectonic plates surrounding his life, and he can be so unlucky as to be helpless over his own personality, that is personality and not self. I take the two entities to be quite different. In fact, I suppose personality to be an obstacle to realization of self and that realization of self prerequisite to a poet’s ascension to the sublime.
- Masters and Master Works: On Black Male Poetics by Afaa Weaver
[Is there] still a choice to be made regarding the role a black male poet should choose? Perhaps, but that implies the ideal of leadership, which is a problematic holdover from centuries of male domination. The black poetic tradition is defined, to a large extent, by the accomplishments of black women, accomplishments that never came to black men.
- Masters and Master Works: On Black Male Poetics by Afaa Weaver
Notable Voices of Black Liberation Poetry
Phillis Wheatley
Jay Wright
Robert Hayden
Langston Hughes
Amiri Baraka aka Leroi Jones
Henry Dumas
Gwendolyn Brooks
Jayne Cortez
Eugene Redmond
Mumia Abu-Jamal
Highly Recommended Manifesto on Liberation Poetry:
http://www.tanbou.com/1996/LiberationPoetry.htm
“The Black Narrator” –Ahmed Alhamisi, 1966
1
White poems
Are daggers, guns, cops.
piercing hearts in weird designs. Ofays
beating niggers to their knees. Coloured
girls with wigs passing & cutting Afro’s
minds. Or black poems judged by whitey’s
standards….
…
2
Black poems are beautiful…
…A
poem for wooly-haired brothers, natural-haired sisters.
Bimbos.
boots & woogies. Or nappy-headed youngsters
Cause they want what i
Want: blood from revolutions…
3
Here in america i want black thoughts, in forms of con
crete skies
tumbling down
on dingy ofays. on negro
middleclass heads (konked-haired hipsters. wig-wearing
whores…)
Crush their minds & lives thoughts. Talk to them in
chinese
vietnamese
Or
black language
“Black Art” by LeRoi Jones, 1966
Poems are bullshit unless they are
teeth or trees or lemons piled
on a step. Or black ladies dying
of men leaving nickel hearts
beating them down. Fuck poems
and they are useful, they shoot
come at you, love what you are,
breathe like wrestlers, or shudder
strangely after pissing. We want live
words of the hip world live flesh &
coursing blood. Hearts Brains
Souls splintering fire. We want poems
like fists beating niggers out of Jocks.
City Trees
A small calico girl
huddles under the meager shadow
of a dying honey locust.
(City trees are always dying.)
The slide is fried
The monkey bars burn
But there’s nothing else here
Home is close but
You can’t go there, no
Your noise wakes her up,
And damn near everyone knows
That she don’t wake up until
The sweaty heat has passed.
You, barely more than toddling,
Say this with such nonchalance
Such everyday normative regularity
Apathy I thought had to be learned
Apathy that is inherent to you
And if she’s locked up like
a Disney Princess
(except she would never be
a Disney Princess
not with skin so dark)
then who will remember you small,
calico child,
who will ever know about you?
Time flies, and next thing
you’re pregnant
An older child, alone on the schoolbus
Speaks of her mother:
“My ma, she can’t read and
this is just fine
she gots a job and
she got pregnant and
she got pregnant again and
this is just fine
she can’t read and
this is just fine”
And looking at you,
And looking at the rest of you
And by god, here in the north,
We were all innocent bystanders to that big civil mess, no never us,
Just a stones throw away
From the cradle of liberty
It’s like Will Simmons is laughing
While the President Wilson claps
At how amazingly profound
of a joke is being told
and better yet,
the dumb mouthed party
of the guffawing stupid
applauding how brilliant
this joke is.
And listening to you,
A calico child, a lonesome girl,
And knowing that you know
Just how sick the joke is
I feel nauseous.
But I pay the Klecktoken
And we all gather round
To read from the Kloran.
“In 1492, Columbus discovered America.”
“Slavery in the United States
ended in 1865.”
***
Memory and (comm)Unity: Black Liberation Poetry
“In a new world where African people were transported to labor, die, and disappear, we’ve needed unbound voices to reformulate our destiny—voices refusing to be ensnared by somebody else’s terms. … Listen to them, to ourselves, to the best we’ve managed to write and say and dance and paint and sing. African-American culture, in spite of the weight, the assaults it has endured, may contain a key to our nation’s survival, a key not found simply in the goal of material prosperity, but in the force of spirit, will, communal interdependence.”
-John Edgar Wideman
Not unlike the African Griots, the Surrealists or the Chicano poets, the practitioners of liberation poetry approach language with great suspicion. They know that any motivated social, religious, ideological or ethnic group can use and manipulate the attributes of a given language for its own agenda—and it usually works for the benefit of the most privileged… In this respect, poets as diverse as Gary Hicks, Mutaburuka or Jack Hirshman have manipulated the English language to say things other than what it was originally invented (and intended) to say: a discourse of disruption that goes overboard of both the confines of academic dogmas and the mystification of prejudiced truths.
- Un-poetic Manifesto of Liberation Poetry
Beauty is relative; its pretended universal splendor, as represented in the ruling classes’ standard of valor, is a fraud: its false transcendence is revealed, denounced and devalued by the not so endearing occurrences in practical reality.
- Un-poetic Manifesto of Liberation Poetry
Governments and political systems come and go, but people continue to live the dream of being with hope in a better tomorrow even in the middle of abysmal horror
- Un-poetic Manifesto of Liberation Poetry
A poet has no way of shaping and shifting such tectonic plates surrounding his life, and he can be so unlucky as to be helpless over his own personality, that is personality and not self. I take the two entities to be quite different. In fact, I suppose personality to be an obstacle to realization of self and that realization of self prerequisite to a poet’s ascension to the sublime.
- Masters and Master Works: On Black Male Poetics by Afaa Weaver
[Is there] still a choice to be made regarding the role a black male poet should choose? Perhaps, but that implies the ideal of leadership, which is a problematic holdover from centuries of male domination. The black poetic tradition is defined, to a large extent, by the accomplishments of black women, accomplishments that never came to black men.
- Masters and Master Works: On Black Male Poetics by Afaa Weaver
Notable Voices of Black Liberation Poetry
Phillis Wheatley
Jay Wright
Robert Hayden
Langston Hughes
Amiri Baraka aka Leroi Jones
Henry Dumas
Gwendolyn Brooks
Jayne Cortez
Eugene Redmond
Mumia Abu-Jamal
Highly Recommended Manifesto on Liberation Poetry:
http://www.tanbou.com/1996/LiberationPoetry.htm
“The Black Narrator” –Ahmed Alhamisi, 1966
1
White poems
Are daggers, guns, cops.
piercing hearts in weird designs. Ofays
beating niggers to their knees. Coloured
girls with wigs passing & cutting Afro’s
minds. Or black poems judged by whitey’s
standards….
…
2
Black poems are beautiful…
…A
poem for wooly-haired brothers, natural-haired sisters.
Bimbos.
boots & woogies. Or nappy-headed youngsters
Cause they want what i
Want: blood from revolutions…
3
Here in america i want black thoughts, in forms of con
crete skies
tumbling down
on dingy ofays. on negro
middleclass heads (konked-haired hipsters. wig-wearing
whores…)
Crush their minds & lives thoughts. Talk to them in
chinese
vietnamese
Or
black language
“Black Art” by LeRoi Jones, 1966
Poems are bullshit unless they are
teeth or trees or lemons piled
on a step. Or black ladies dying
of men leaving nickel hearts
beating them down. Fuck poems
and they are useful, they shoot
come at you, love what you are,
breathe like wrestlers, or shudder
strangely after pissing. We want live
words of the hip world live flesh &
coursing blood. Hearts Brains
Souls splintering fire. We want poems
like fists beating niggers out of Jocks.
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Community Food System: Old Thoughts
These are entries that I have previously written in response to a class I'm taking at UMASS in the Plant, Soil, and Insect Science department titled Community Food Systems. We have been reading "The Omnivore's Dilemma" by Michael Pollan and recording our thoughts on the readings and the content of the course.
9/7
The information within the CFS Primer acted as an organizing tool to a scattered knowledge that I have been learning and discovering, creating a coherent method to deliver an idea that seems to have been forgotten for so long. It feels unfair that a large part of our human nation has managed to collectively and voluntarily undergo an amnesic state about something that was once so integral to our species. The act of consuming energy in the form of food is the essential trait of our animal kingdom. Pastorals and Agriculturists alike. And so having been able to cultivate plants to our liking and sustain our growth over time by the means of agriculture has serious implications towards our relationship with the natural world. This is an implication that to be human is to inherently know the plants we consume. We distinguish the beneficial from the toxic, we utilize our distinctly human trait of manipulating fire to cook the food, through trial and error we have found which foods complement what and what properties they have in regard to our health; these are discoveries that are incredible and unforgettable to our species.
It feels strange, then, that myself and many other human beings have only recently rediscovered how sacred a relationship it is that we have with our food.
Our society makes it easy to grow up with the belief that food is an easy commodity, that it is found wherever there is a supermarket. Feeling disconnected with the food we eat is common; the food we eat is easily wasted as it is easily replaced by something more fitting to what we crave.
Outranked only by tobacco use, the leading ultimate cause of death amongst Americans as found from a 1990 and 2000 study is poor diet and physical activity [Mokdad et al, American Medical Association 2004). There is something seriously wrong with how we are eating.
I am in this class because of the threat of the popular eating habits of our nation on the public health of our nation. I am here to further educate myself about something that I should have always known, being human. It is vital to my well-being to remember the connection I have with the food that is grown to feed myself, my family, and my community as a whole. I want more people to wake up and remember that we are connected deeply to what we eat and that we can't allow ourselves to accept amnesia and to blindly consume food that originates in a lab rather than a field. I am taking this class to educate others about the importance of our community food system and why it is we need to know what we are eating. It is essential to me.
9/14
My mother is a preschool teacher, and part of the curriculum she teaches includes a week of learning about farms, farm animals, and the food grown at the farm. Picture books, games, and toys are the tools used to represent and educate. Visits to local farms are usually included. I remember when I was young and my mental image for agriculture looked more like Mr. McGregor's garden or Zuckerman's Farm. It seems disjointed then, that what is taught in schools and what children learn to be agriculture includes no connections whatsoever to the food that we purchase. Children don't learn about the enormous monoculture plots that provide the coveted junk food in the middle of the supermarket. That stuff has to be made with magic, and indeed there's plenty of commercials showing Elves using secret ingredients and spells to make sugary, fat loaded treats to reinforce this notion.
The fact that the vast majority has no opinion about The Farm Bill and the impact made by it suggests that the idea that food comes from a magic place that none of us can see or visit (Iowa) is shared by the masses.
I would imagine that children would be outraged to learn that there is no magic land that makes cookies and treats and snacks. Instead, there's just rows upon rows of the same plants: corn, soybeans, wheat, rice. And that these massive plots of the same plant encroach upon Mr. McGregor's garden and Zuckerman's farm and put them out of work. I would think a child would tell their parents no, if you buy that happy meal then the farmers they learned about in school won't be able to keep their farms. The only reason we don't see children doing this is because they aren't being taught about the relationship between their local farmers and the giant industrial monocultures.
The Farm Bill and the topics that Michael Pollan writes about in his article are shocking when they shouldn't be. Our nation is by and large ignorant about food and this needs to be changed. People need to recognize the decisions that are being made against public well-being as well as against environmental well-being. Beginning in early education, our national eye needs to open if it ever hopes to recover from a long coma of ignorance towards the decisions made by the select few that affect he majority.
With that, I'm looking forward to the opportunity in this class to present the concepts of community food systems to local schools.
9/21
Really, truly: not all carrots are created equal. Humans should know this by know. We, more so perhaps than any other species, celebrate the fact of a naturally occurring uniqueness. We’ve spent centuries congratulating ourselves for being able to produce the kind of individualistic qualities that we celebrate in our hallmark geniuses, engineers, scientists, and those who go out there and “discover” the world we forgot we belonged to for the rest of us.
We let ourselves become overwhelmed at this capacity for diversity. We were so obsessed with our own potential that we somehow distanced ourselves from the very ecological diversity that we co-evolved with, the logical chaos of the natural world. Without that biodiversity, we simply would not be.
This can be certain: there is a very good reason that a plant thrives best under certain conditions; a particular animal has an inherent motivation to eat a certain set of plants; and those who enjoy life at the top of the food chain have evolved side-by-side with the particularities of those animals, plants, and microbes.
Examine the different regions of the world and you’ll find a deep relationship between the cultures of the native peoples there and the foods that they have evolved side by side with. The various peoples of India did not up and decide that they as a people really enjoyed the spice mix that resulted in curry and masala and that they would thus cultivate this from now on; Indian cuisine is a result of the relationship between the plants that occurred in that particular geographic region and climate and the people who established themselves there.
Is there not something strange then about someone living in New England eating grapefruit in September? The grapefruit in question was purchased by one of my housemates. We had made a mission as a household to minimize the damage we wrought on the world. Our produce came from the share we bought at the Hampshire College farm. We were going to work hard to be “sustainable”; we talked about it and decided on setting up a communal food system. We would buy from the farmer’s market, get our milk and eggs from the farmer’s hands, order our bulk grains and oil through the Hampshire student-run food co-op Mixed Nuts… I really thought that we were going to take a collective step in the right direction. Our communal food purchases we agreed to split the costs between all six of us living together…
Then came the $87 receipt from Whole Foods. Grapefruits? Imported ginger? Almond butter? Not to mention the sudden appearance of non-communal packaged USDA certified organic mixed greens and asparagus and so on. But the amount of food we picked up from farmshare was more than enough to feed all of us…
I suppose it isn’t my place to begrudge those who wish to eat grapefruit in Amherst of this great fortune. It was bought at Whole Foods (surely a better choice than Stop & Shop) after all, and the fruit (originally cultivated in Barbados, a hybrid of the pomelo and the sweet orange) is certainly packed with antioxidants and all sorts of the stuff that we’re supposed to give our bodies. But according to whom, nutritionists in the unique position of having an entire planet-worth of menu options to choose from?
There was a reason the first grapefruit was grown in Barbados. And I’m almost positive that it had nothing to do with feeding the inhabitants of a temperate broadleaf and mixed mesophytic forest of the northeast United States.
I’ve never bought from Whole Foods before; I always considered it out of my budget, not to mention a big scam. Sure I play into the organic thing when I’m unable to get my veggies from local sources. “At least it’s better than conventional farming,” I say to myself when caught between a sore desire to eat something green and the lack of a local source.
I thought it was a little outrageous, those grapefruits. I’m used to eating apples in the fall, maybe peaches and pears too. “At least they’re organic.” Hmm. Well. Whatever that even means.
Reading about the Goodmans and Gene Khan raised an awareness of transience. They were like us. They wanted to live in harmony with nature, live in a self-sufficient and waste-free way. They existed outside of the mainstream, capitalist bullshit… for a moment. Then the world shook all the soul out of them and turned their ideals into industrial organic.
I feel privileged to be here in this time and in this place, in a community of like-minded individuals eager for change. But the grapefruits on the kitchen counter have me stumped. There are so many of us who see that there is something so wrong with the way our nation eats. We change our diets; we reject the ways our parents ate. The thing that gets me though is how half-assed we do this. We’re experiencing this buzz for change, but there are way too many who believe what the label says and settle for the story they want to believe.
Change, I believe, happens in waves, in little progressive increments. We’ve opened our eyes to the fact that the big-time industrial has damaged our health as well as our land. So we switch to shopping at Whole Foods and opting for the big organic. It’s so popular these days, it’s hard not to get caught up into it. But all the self-celebration has stopped us from fully opening our eyes.
I didn’t get how bad the industrial organic really was until Michael Pollan confronted me with it. It is now hard to avoid a strong aversion to eating anything that would be improbable to eat in this season, in this region. The real problem lies in getting my housemates as well as other members of my community to realize that the big organic isn’t good enough; it’s a step in the right direction but it is NOT ok to think that the problems created by agribusiness are just going to go away if we buy into the story fed to us on the package marked by the USDA organic seal.
9/28
Everything is connected; this is more than the law of ecology. This is the law of life, of history, of the future: it is all so detrimentally connected. If more chickens are introduced to the land, then a pollution problem will arise. When balance is lost, that is when there is a problem.
According to traditional Taoist belief and Chinese herbal medicine, the human spirit and health depends upon the balance of the yin and yang. This is described variously: too much fire in the liver; excess wind in the skin. These aren’t mystical concepts, as these terms might lead western thinkers to believe. Rather, these particular descriptions are a means to describe how things function in relation to each other and to the universe. This is the system of thinking that Joel Salatin promotes. There are many philosophies of Lao Tzu (considered the founder of Taoism) that describe this balance of yin and yang:
In order to contract,
It is necessary first to expand.
In order to weaken,
It is necessary first to strengthen.
In order to destroy,
It is necessary first to promote.
In order to grasp,
It is necessary first to give.
This principle is the method of recovering the gross global imbalance that Joel Salatin and Michael Pollan are prescribing to. In order for our species to heal the damage we have done to our spirits, bodies, health, and our environment, we need to restore balance. Salatin is attempting to regain balance through his efforts at Polyface Farm. He commits his farm and life to mimicking natural ecology by maintaining his farm in four dimensions, time as well as space. He practices the laws of the natural world, and by doing so is rewarded with the bounty of earth. His life is devoted to honoring this pact.
How would the rest of us go about to restoring balance? We are in a position that makes it approximately impossible for us all to live like Joel Salatin, not at our population growth rate, ecological degradation, and resource deprivation. It will take so much time for our people to cease the damage we inflict and globally implement healing. So many mental models would need to adjust. Many of us have begun changing our systems thinking to reflect the laws of ecology, but there are still so many people who are unable to change because of the pressure of socio-economic factors.
Social-Environmental justice is crucial to our education of community food systems and environmental restoration. Before we can hope to implement wide-scale revitalization of our planet and people, we need to first address the level of imbalance in our economy and society at large.
9/7
The information within the CFS Primer acted as an organizing tool to a scattered knowledge that I have been learning and discovering, creating a coherent method to deliver an idea that seems to have been forgotten for so long. It feels unfair that a large part of our human nation has managed to collectively and voluntarily undergo an amnesic state about something that was once so integral to our species. The act of consuming energy in the form of food is the essential trait of our animal kingdom. Pastorals and Agriculturists alike. And so having been able to cultivate plants to our liking and sustain our growth over time by the means of agriculture has serious implications towards our relationship with the natural world. This is an implication that to be human is to inherently know the plants we consume. We distinguish the beneficial from the toxic, we utilize our distinctly human trait of manipulating fire to cook the food, through trial and error we have found which foods complement what and what properties they have in regard to our health; these are discoveries that are incredible and unforgettable to our species.
It feels strange, then, that myself and many other human beings have only recently rediscovered how sacred a relationship it is that we have with our food.
Our society makes it easy to grow up with the belief that food is an easy commodity, that it is found wherever there is a supermarket. Feeling disconnected with the food we eat is common; the food we eat is easily wasted as it is easily replaced by something more fitting to what we crave.
Outranked only by tobacco use, the leading ultimate cause of death amongst Americans as found from a 1990 and 2000 study is poor diet and physical activity [Mokdad et al, American Medical Association 2004). There is something seriously wrong with how we are eating.
I am in this class because of the threat of the popular eating habits of our nation on the public health of our nation. I am here to further educate myself about something that I should have always known, being human. It is vital to my well-being to remember the connection I have with the food that is grown to feed myself, my family, and my community as a whole. I want more people to wake up and remember that we are connected deeply to what we eat and that we can't allow ourselves to accept amnesia and to blindly consume food that originates in a lab rather than a field. I am taking this class to educate others about the importance of our community food system and why it is we need to know what we are eating. It is essential to me.
9/14
My mother is a preschool teacher, and part of the curriculum she teaches includes a week of learning about farms, farm animals, and the food grown at the farm. Picture books, games, and toys are the tools used to represent and educate. Visits to local farms are usually included. I remember when I was young and my mental image for agriculture looked more like Mr. McGregor's garden or Zuckerman's Farm. It seems disjointed then, that what is taught in schools and what children learn to be agriculture includes no connections whatsoever to the food that we purchase. Children don't learn about the enormous monoculture plots that provide the coveted junk food in the middle of the supermarket. That stuff has to be made with magic, and indeed there's plenty of commercials showing Elves using secret ingredients and spells to make sugary, fat loaded treats to reinforce this notion.
The fact that the vast majority has no opinion about The Farm Bill and the impact made by it suggests that the idea that food comes from a magic place that none of us can see or visit (Iowa) is shared by the masses.
I would imagine that children would be outraged to learn that there is no magic land that makes cookies and treats and snacks. Instead, there's just rows upon rows of the same plants: corn, soybeans, wheat, rice. And that these massive plots of the same plant encroach upon Mr. McGregor's garden and Zuckerman's farm and put them out of work. I would think a child would tell their parents no, if you buy that happy meal then the farmers they learned about in school won't be able to keep their farms. The only reason we don't see children doing this is because they aren't being taught about the relationship between their local farmers and the giant industrial monocultures.
The Farm Bill and the topics that Michael Pollan writes about in his article are shocking when they shouldn't be. Our nation is by and large ignorant about food and this needs to be changed. People need to recognize the decisions that are being made against public well-being as well as against environmental well-being. Beginning in early education, our national eye needs to open if it ever hopes to recover from a long coma of ignorance towards the decisions made by the select few that affect he majority.
With that, I'm looking forward to the opportunity in this class to present the concepts of community food systems to local schools.
9/21
Really, truly: not all carrots are created equal. Humans should know this by know. We, more so perhaps than any other species, celebrate the fact of a naturally occurring uniqueness. We’ve spent centuries congratulating ourselves for being able to produce the kind of individualistic qualities that we celebrate in our hallmark geniuses, engineers, scientists, and those who go out there and “discover” the world we forgot we belonged to for the rest of us.
We let ourselves become overwhelmed at this capacity for diversity. We were so obsessed with our own potential that we somehow distanced ourselves from the very ecological diversity that we co-evolved with, the logical chaos of the natural world. Without that biodiversity, we simply would not be.
This can be certain: there is a very good reason that a plant thrives best under certain conditions; a particular animal has an inherent motivation to eat a certain set of plants; and those who enjoy life at the top of the food chain have evolved side-by-side with the particularities of those animals, plants, and microbes.
Examine the different regions of the world and you’ll find a deep relationship between the cultures of the native peoples there and the foods that they have evolved side by side with. The various peoples of India did not up and decide that they as a people really enjoyed the spice mix that resulted in curry and masala and that they would thus cultivate this from now on; Indian cuisine is a result of the relationship between the plants that occurred in that particular geographic region and climate and the people who established themselves there.
Is there not something strange then about someone living in New England eating grapefruit in September? The grapefruit in question was purchased by one of my housemates. We had made a mission as a household to minimize the damage we wrought on the world. Our produce came from the share we bought at the Hampshire College farm. We were going to work hard to be “sustainable”; we talked about it and decided on setting up a communal food system. We would buy from the farmer’s market, get our milk and eggs from the farmer’s hands, order our bulk grains and oil through the Hampshire student-run food co-op Mixed Nuts… I really thought that we were going to take a collective step in the right direction. Our communal food purchases we agreed to split the costs between all six of us living together…
Then came the $87 receipt from Whole Foods. Grapefruits? Imported ginger? Almond butter? Not to mention the sudden appearance of non-communal packaged USDA certified organic mixed greens and asparagus and so on. But the amount of food we picked up from farmshare was more than enough to feed all of us…
I suppose it isn’t my place to begrudge those who wish to eat grapefruit in Amherst of this great fortune. It was bought at Whole Foods (surely a better choice than Stop & Shop) after all, and the fruit (originally cultivated in Barbados, a hybrid of the pomelo and the sweet orange) is certainly packed with antioxidants and all sorts of the stuff that we’re supposed to give our bodies. But according to whom, nutritionists in the unique position of having an entire planet-worth of menu options to choose from?
There was a reason the first grapefruit was grown in Barbados. And I’m almost positive that it had nothing to do with feeding the inhabitants of a temperate broadleaf and mixed mesophytic forest of the northeast United States.
I’ve never bought from Whole Foods before; I always considered it out of my budget, not to mention a big scam. Sure I play into the organic thing when I’m unable to get my veggies from local sources. “At least it’s better than conventional farming,” I say to myself when caught between a sore desire to eat something green and the lack of a local source.
I thought it was a little outrageous, those grapefruits. I’m used to eating apples in the fall, maybe peaches and pears too. “At least they’re organic.” Hmm. Well. Whatever that even means.
Reading about the Goodmans and Gene Khan raised an awareness of transience. They were like us. They wanted to live in harmony with nature, live in a self-sufficient and waste-free way. They existed outside of the mainstream, capitalist bullshit… for a moment. Then the world shook all the soul out of them and turned their ideals into industrial organic.
I feel privileged to be here in this time and in this place, in a community of like-minded individuals eager for change. But the grapefruits on the kitchen counter have me stumped. There are so many of us who see that there is something so wrong with the way our nation eats. We change our diets; we reject the ways our parents ate. The thing that gets me though is how half-assed we do this. We’re experiencing this buzz for change, but there are way too many who believe what the label says and settle for the story they want to believe.
Change, I believe, happens in waves, in little progressive increments. We’ve opened our eyes to the fact that the big-time industrial has damaged our health as well as our land. So we switch to shopping at Whole Foods and opting for the big organic. It’s so popular these days, it’s hard not to get caught up into it. But all the self-celebration has stopped us from fully opening our eyes.
I didn’t get how bad the industrial organic really was until Michael Pollan confronted me with it. It is now hard to avoid a strong aversion to eating anything that would be improbable to eat in this season, in this region. The real problem lies in getting my housemates as well as other members of my community to realize that the big organic isn’t good enough; it’s a step in the right direction but it is NOT ok to think that the problems created by agribusiness are just going to go away if we buy into the story fed to us on the package marked by the USDA organic seal.
9/28
Everything is connected; this is more than the law of ecology. This is the law of life, of history, of the future: it is all so detrimentally connected. If more chickens are introduced to the land, then a pollution problem will arise. When balance is lost, that is when there is a problem.
According to traditional Taoist belief and Chinese herbal medicine, the human spirit and health depends upon the balance of the yin and yang. This is described variously: too much fire in the liver; excess wind in the skin. These aren’t mystical concepts, as these terms might lead western thinkers to believe. Rather, these particular descriptions are a means to describe how things function in relation to each other and to the universe. This is the system of thinking that Joel Salatin promotes. There are many philosophies of Lao Tzu (considered the founder of Taoism) that describe this balance of yin and yang:
In order to contract,
It is necessary first to expand.
In order to weaken,
It is necessary first to strengthen.
In order to destroy,
It is necessary first to promote.
In order to grasp,
It is necessary first to give.
This principle is the method of recovering the gross global imbalance that Joel Salatin and Michael Pollan are prescribing to. In order for our species to heal the damage we have done to our spirits, bodies, health, and our environment, we need to restore balance. Salatin is attempting to regain balance through his efforts at Polyface Farm. He commits his farm and life to mimicking natural ecology by maintaining his farm in four dimensions, time as well as space. He practices the laws of the natural world, and by doing so is rewarded with the bounty of earth. His life is devoted to honoring this pact.
How would the rest of us go about to restoring balance? We are in a position that makes it approximately impossible for us all to live like Joel Salatin, not at our population growth rate, ecological degradation, and resource deprivation. It will take so much time for our people to cease the damage we inflict and globally implement healing. So many mental models would need to adjust. Many of us have begun changing our systems thinking to reflect the laws of ecology, but there are still so many people who are unable to change because of the pressure of socio-economic factors.
Social-Environmental justice is crucial to our education of community food systems and environmental restoration. Before we can hope to implement wide-scale revitalization of our planet and people, we need to first address the level of imbalance in our economy and society at large.
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
The first day of October
Last Wednesday's installment of Community Food Systems left me with a whirlwind of emotions. A lot of what I felt was tied deeply into my personal experience with an economically imbalanced society.
Myself, my two brothers, and my sister were raised by my mother. My mother graduated college with a bachelor's in Early Childhood Education and has never been unable to find work. As soon as we were old enough for daycare, my mother has worked and continues to work to this day as a full time Head Preschool Teacher. Despite being hardworking, educated, intelligent, and motivated, my mother has never been able to fully support herself and her four children alone. Because of this, our family has received an insane amount of charity. She has been provided a share from local food pantries since we were babies till now. The first house we've ever owned was built for us by Habitat for Humanity about seven years ago. Even though my older brother and I have left home and have become financially independent does not mean that our family has escaped poverty. My mother has, since having children, lived just below the poverty line, despite working a full time respectable job while supplementing her income with part time work for catering companies and church nurseries.
What I wonder, these days, is how unfairly this charity has been distributed. Because we were so fortunate to belong to the socio-economically dominant race and be able to move to a town that was majorly upper middle class (Ipswich, MA - median income: $57,284), we were considered a novel representation of the 4.1% of Ipswich families living below the poverty line. Because we were white and well educated, we were given the help that the immigrant Latino population of Ipswich is refused.
Andrew Morehouse talking about food stamps, pantries, and other food service programs created this eruption of hot shame while I sat and listened to him in class. This feeling could be attributed into an overwhelming sense of self-consciousness. I felt like I was an invader in this discussion, because we were all talking about a population that I have come to UMASS to represent. What was being discussed was a population that existed not within the classroom, not within the context of that insightful discussion, but entirely on the outside. Even though this was not something mentioned, the feeling I had was of division: us (the upper-middle class college educated) and them (the impoverished in need of assistance).
There is no us and them when it comes to class barriers and economic injustice. There is, rather, cause and effect. Obese black and Latino children in closed off urban food deserts is the effect of socially ambivalent lawmakers and monoculture surplus. Uneducated and drug addicted urban youth is the effect of a corrupt and racist society. The amount of charity bestowed on my family to ease the hunger and homelessness we experienced is a direct effect of a predominantly white sense of guilt and responsibility to relieve suffering, if only minutely.
Why is it that Habitat for Humanity (an organization very much so based around Christian principles) is able to construct a home for the white working single mothers of affluent North Shore communities, while there are still so many displaced victims (impoverished and mostly black) of Hurricane Katrina waiting three years after the fact for some sort of compensation for that disaster and the government's apathy towards their entire community?
After class, I called my mother while she was on her break from work. I told her the class had left me feeling upset and overwhelmed with my own memories of experiencing poverty and hunger. We talked a little about the bail-out plan. My mother laughed and told me that she isn't worried about it, because it just means that there's more people who are going to have to live the way we always have.
I have been thinking much more on the subject of social and environmental injustice. I saw the film 'Trouble the Water' on Saturday, which addresses this very topic of racism and injustice. This movie impacted me in a way that I cannot formulate into words. In my adult life, I have devoted two summers to working with urban youth in the port city New Bedford. The people in this movie, the children and families that I worked with: these are the people that need the most help, the most nutrition and education but they are always the last people on the mind of our country. My mother, white and educated, was able to raise her children vegetarian, emphasize the importance of healthy eating, activities, and the utmost importance of our educations. What about those people who are kept under the thumb of society, without even enough wiggle room to question why this is happening to them?
Yes, our national food system is in shambles. But one of the biggest issues that needs to be addressed before we can go about changing the way we eat is who is being hurt the most by this system, and why is it that they are being kept ignorant about this. Is it because (like Kanye West famously said) President Bush doesn't care about black people?
Go see 'Trouble the Water' and visit downtown New Bedford or Holyoke or Springfield. The answer should be obvious.
Myself, my two brothers, and my sister were raised by my mother. My mother graduated college with a bachelor's in Early Childhood Education and has never been unable to find work. As soon as we were old enough for daycare, my mother has worked and continues to work to this day as a full time Head Preschool Teacher. Despite being hardworking, educated, intelligent, and motivated, my mother has never been able to fully support herself and her four children alone. Because of this, our family has received an insane amount of charity. She has been provided a share from local food pantries since we were babies till now. The first house we've ever owned was built for us by Habitat for Humanity about seven years ago. Even though my older brother and I have left home and have become financially independent does not mean that our family has escaped poverty. My mother has, since having children, lived just below the poverty line, despite working a full time respectable job while supplementing her income with part time work for catering companies and church nurseries.
What I wonder, these days, is how unfairly this charity has been distributed. Because we were so fortunate to belong to the socio-economically dominant race and be able to move to a town that was majorly upper middle class (Ipswich, MA - median income: $57,284), we were considered a novel representation of the 4.1% of Ipswich families living below the poverty line. Because we were white and well educated, we were given the help that the immigrant Latino population of Ipswich is refused.
Andrew Morehouse talking about food stamps, pantries, and other food service programs created this eruption of hot shame while I sat and listened to him in class. This feeling could be attributed into an overwhelming sense of self-consciousness. I felt like I was an invader in this discussion, because we were all talking about a population that I have come to UMASS to represent. What was being discussed was a population that existed not within the classroom, not within the context of that insightful discussion, but entirely on the outside. Even though this was not something mentioned, the feeling I had was of division: us (the upper-middle class college educated) and them (the impoverished in need of assistance).
There is no us and them when it comes to class barriers and economic injustice. There is, rather, cause and effect. Obese black and Latino children in closed off urban food deserts is the effect of socially ambivalent lawmakers and monoculture surplus. Uneducated and drug addicted urban youth is the effect of a corrupt and racist society. The amount of charity bestowed on my family to ease the hunger and homelessness we experienced is a direct effect of a predominantly white sense of guilt and responsibility to relieve suffering, if only minutely.
Why is it that Habitat for Humanity (an organization very much so based around Christian principles) is able to construct a home for the white working single mothers of affluent North Shore communities, while there are still so many displaced victims (impoverished and mostly black) of Hurricane Katrina waiting three years after the fact for some sort of compensation for that disaster and the government's apathy towards their entire community?
After class, I called my mother while she was on her break from work. I told her the class had left me feeling upset and overwhelmed with my own memories of experiencing poverty and hunger. We talked a little about the bail-out plan. My mother laughed and told me that she isn't worried about it, because it just means that there's more people who are going to have to live the way we always have.
I have been thinking much more on the subject of social and environmental injustice. I saw the film 'Trouble the Water' on Saturday, which addresses this very topic of racism and injustice. This movie impacted me in a way that I cannot formulate into words. In my adult life, I have devoted two summers to working with urban youth in the port city New Bedford. The people in this movie, the children and families that I worked with: these are the people that need the most help, the most nutrition and education but they are always the last people on the mind of our country. My mother, white and educated, was able to raise her children vegetarian, emphasize the importance of healthy eating, activities, and the utmost importance of our educations. What about those people who are kept under the thumb of society, without even enough wiggle room to question why this is happening to them?
Yes, our national food system is in shambles. But one of the biggest issues that needs to be addressed before we can go about changing the way we eat is who is being hurt the most by this system, and why is it that they are being kept ignorant about this. Is it because (like Kanye West famously said) President Bush doesn't care about black people?
Go see 'Trouble the Water' and visit downtown New Bedford or Holyoke or Springfield. The answer should be obvious.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
