Update!
On Thursday I went to the afternoon farm practicum workshop where we pruned the kiwi and apple trees. Part of participating in that practicum has opened up a new writing project for me that I will be slowly starting in the next few weeks and completing more substantial work on during the spring and summer. Currently, I am planning on taking Practice of Organic Farming beginning in Spring 2017. In preparation for the changes that the farm program will be going through to include culture studies in Spring 2018, I will be doing extra work that is focused on documenting student projects happening at the Organic Farm over the next season. While the actual application and presentation of this project is still in progress, the ultimate goal is to create a writing piece that is similar to the Farmer’s Almanac but specifically focused on the Organic Farm at Evergreen. I have accepted to begin working on this project after a conversation about reflective writing that I shared with Sarah.
I’ve begun writing about the winter farm workshops as well as an introduction/proposal for the project. Here is a snippet of the pre-writing I completed before beginning to draft the project proposal:
Reflective writing is about remembering how the body is the mind is the mouth. In our field research, the earth has been our subject of study; our practicum is set in her stomach. Possibly it was through our own mouths that we first let matter and memory mix. Privileged enough to experience the product of the land as sustenance and sensual experience. Is it our own consciousness that has consumed us into the practice of working with the soils of the farm? What did we swallow that consequently swallowed us? We’ve landed here, in her earthy belly. It would be indigestible, not to write here, too.
As for my current exploration around social food movements and intersecting identity, I spent a lot of my time this past week collecting/revising my notes in order to start writing my Week 7 Research paper. After the hours spent doing this, I did not end up reading everything that I originally planned to, which is fine, given that there will be time to catch up during Week 5.
I did begin to read Spaces of Danger and Food Transgressions: Making Sense of Contemporary Food Politics, two books which I’ve been increasingly excited to start reading this quarter
Spaces of Danger
I read a few sections of essays within Spaces of Danger, however I am thinking I will trade out this book with another one that is more relevant to my project as there is only one section that appealed to the ideas that I am working with. Chapter ten, “Even in Plurinational Bolivia: Indigeneity, Development, and Racism since Morales” written by Nancy Postero is about the racism that indigenous people in Bolivia face from the government. Since the first election of indigenous president Evo Morales, outside of the country itself, Bolivia has been an example of a socialist and equitable government. However as Postero and other scholars are quick to claim, this is not the case whatsoever. Before his election Morales was a member of the Cocaleros, the Bolivians who were fighting for the indigenous rights to continue growing coca on their land. However, in the past years, Morales has let other legislation that would negatively impact the environment for indigenous people pass by. The most well known example of this is the TIPNIS highway case from in 2011 and 2012. The plans for the route, led the highway through the Isiboro-Sécure Indigenous Territory and National Park (TIPNIS). This road, designed to carry oil exports, would have cut off people from water resources that are needed for agriculture.
Food Transgressions: Making Sense of Contemporary Food Politics
Two different essays I read in Food Transgressions are about the ethics of Community Supported Agriculture as well as the criticisms of Slow Food. The first passage about CSAs was reporting results from surveys that CSA community members participated in. The second passage about Slow Food reminded me of a journal titled Mobilising Bodies: Visceral Identification in the Slow Food Movement that I read during Week 1. The difference between that article and this newer material is that the authors of Mobilising Bodies separated issues such as race and gender from their journal that was based upon class accessibility. The reading I read this week did not abandon these ideas and therefore felt much more reputable.