Class Pictures

Beth, Frieda, and Somer



Ben, Aliza, and Melissa



Theresa, Jamie, and Anna



Celina, Chris, and Lindsay



Rob, Maria, and Shelly



Jonah, Jacqueline, and Kelly



Josh, Steve, and Dalya



Sarah, Shelby, and Ariel

A Visit to the Farm

Keith Possee talks to students about how the UW student farm got its start.
Photo credit: Lindsay Lowenthal

Today the class went to visit the UW student farm. It was fascinating to hear Keith Possee talk about how the farm got started. It all stemmed from a couple of people reading Bill McKibben's article The Cuba Diet which was published in Harper's in 2005. Urban gardening became the solution to the loss of access to food imports with the break up of the Soviet Union. Cuba went through a period of general undernourishment until they hit on the solution of turning urban green space and waste space into vegetable gardens. The city now produces 80% of its produce! Clearly, this offered a vision to the biologists at UW of how we might encourage more people to produce their own food in ways that would be sustainable and fuel efficient. I remember reading somewhere, maybe it was in Michael Pollen's book, that we could consider the leaves of plants as photovolteic cells through which we can harness the energy of the sun. When we produce food in our own backyards, we transfer that energy directly to the maintenance of our own lives and those with whom we share food. The food also arrives at our table in a fresher state, without its nutrients having been degraded in transport. Just in transport alone, we expend many more calories than we consume!

Before we walked down to the farm, I shared with the class that I had started my fall salad garden in wooden boxes in my back yard. My family and I have been growing vegetables all summer long, and we have discovered the pleasure of eating food that we have grown ourselves. It really didn't take that much effort, once we got the garden established, to produce beans, tomatoes, peppers, and salad greens. This summer I have discovered the joys of engaging in activities that reduce our carbon profile: riding my bike to school, waiting for a sunny day to do the laundry so I can hang it out to dry, and growing our own vegetables. I don't fully comprehend this unexpected sense of joy I feel in doing these things, except perhaps it is the obverse reaction to my mounting sense of alarm about what our dependence on fossil fuels is doing to the environment.

Bento Day

In Andrea's presentation to us on Thursday, she made a number of points that are important for us to keep in mind as we move on to other topics in the course. The first is that "food is never just food." It is always caught up in cultural systems of meaning, relations of power, and the organization of economic production (meaning, power, value)! Andrea described how Japan's modernization was accompanied by a rural to urban migration during which rice became symbolic of a modern Japanese identity. We forget how novel "national cultures" are because we assume they have always been around. But Japan was tremendously fragmented culturally and even linguistically--there were so many local traditions with no sense of nationhood to bind them together--until the modernization movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The idea of Japan had to be constructed and "rice" became a kind of "common substance" that defined Japaneseness. We might want to think here about food as a common substance--as if consuming it together connects individuals into a larger collective body. This is one important point that Steven Feld was making in "The Boy Who Became a Muni Bird."

However, Andrea also suggested that even today Japan, despite its "myth of homogeneity," still has lines of class, regional, rural/urban difference. In particular, she was anxious for us to understand that the practices described by Anne Allison were most representative of upper-middle-class mothers during the 1980s, in which children were prepped from an early age for the "escalator" toward elite schooling and life-long employment and where much of social life was organized around consumption. This has all changed now with the economic recession in Japan, beginning in the early 1990s. Much of the middle class now face economic insecurity and mothers no longer have the time to make such elaborate bentos. No wonder there is so much nostalgia about them!

In a discussion I had with Andrea prior to the class, she emphasized how important the convenience store has become in Japan, and the rice ball has changed from being something one would make at home and carry to work or school to becoming a commodified form of mass-produced food. This is a topic also discussed in the recommended article by Gavin Whitelaw. You might want to be on the look out for onigiri (rice balls) in their nori-wrapped traditional triangular shape in the food outlets on campus, including the HUB!! I first discovered these early last year and remember thinking that, among all the over-priced options available there, it seemed to offer the most nutritional value for the money--way cheaper than a sandwich and more likely to satisfy late afternoon hunger pangs than a bag of chips. Thinking about this now, after all the reading I have been doing this summer on how industrialized agriculture has changed our diets and the very narrow range of options we have readily available to us, I am struck by the relative healthfulness of the rice ball--yes, I know, it is white rice and all that, but it has a short list of ingredients (one of my criteria for the degree of processedness of foods) and eating one will certainly satisfy. Most processed foods only make me hungrier!

A Hopeful Beginning

Today was the first day of the Discovery Seminar that I am teaching to incoming Freshman for the next four weeks on the Anthropology of Food. Actually, I have changed the title of the class to Food for Thought: Food as an Ethics of Life, which I feel better reflects what the course is really about: a philosophical reflection on how we relate to the world through food. The students seem eager and engaged, and I feel such a sense of excitement over starting something completely new. I do so hope that this course will be as life-transforming for them as the process of planning the course has been for me!

Tomorrow Molly Wizenberg, the author of the food blog Orangette, will come to the class to discuss food writing and help the students set up their food blogs. She is much more experienced than I am with the blogging software and I am trying to calm my technology jitters by remembering that she will be there to help as well as the computer lab people down the hall.

At the end of today's class, I was pleased to show my new sprout growing equipment to the students, and we began to soak the seeds to start our own "grow operation" in Denny 401. I know it sounds a little elementary-schoolish, but there is really something very exciting about watching something actually growing. And I like the idea of turning the classroom into a "working farm." Sprouts are especially good for impatient people like me. I find myself lifting the lids of the trays everytime I pass by just to see the progress that the tiny rootlets make from their first emergence as a small white tip to become developed enough to expose them to the sunlight to green them up for eating.

In doing my research on sprout growing online, I was surprised to discover that they are not only popular with health food nuts but also survivalists. They are such a concentrated source of green nutrition that if you have enough seeds and access to water you can survive a nuclear holocaust or a major earthquake!

Maybe if our sprout endeavor is successful, we may get up the courage to plant lettuces surreptitiously in the landscaped areas outside Denny Hall. I wonder how they would fare? Would passers-by be taken by surprise? Maybe some curly-leafed kale? It is such a beautiful plant.



Curly Leaf Kale at Picardo Farm (Seattle P-Patch)