Week 5

Update!

This was a dense week of reading. There was no Thursday practicum workshop or any other lecture aside from the Tuesday class schedule to go to so I spent the majority of the week going back and forth between online journals and piles of print-outs. This was necessary, because I have felt that I needed to do some more reading about the impacts of community gardens and small farming cooperatives on communities.

I felt especially aggressive toward defending the field of critical food studies after reading Jennifer Ruark’s article, More Scholars Focus on Historical, Social, and Cultural Meanings of Food, but Some Critics Say It’s Scholarship-Lite and as a result I was much determined to talk about education and food with the people around me.

On Tuesday I went to the Bee Think Tank meeting, a collaboration between a handful of Evergreen organizations and clubs to talk about collaborative efforts to bring about bee education to this campus. The folks from WashPIRG are on a mission to become a certified BeeCampus by completing the requirements from Bee City USA so a lot of the meeting was focused on how to create activities that would fit those needs.

I can say that this meeting was a great chance to see how students organize and the work of different leadership styles in action. I also took note of the overall knowledge (and perceived knowledge) that was present in the room and how that was reflecting itself on the people who came to participate. I will certainly be keeping a look out for further things that come from the people leading this mission and hopefully helping advise projects that are related to preserving pollinators at Evergreen.

Aside from this meeting, I truly was reading all week. Here is the link to the bibliography that I completed between Friday and Sunday.

 

I spent a lot of time thinking about the perceptions of alternative agriculture and food movements around the world. I read studies and articles about people in Toronto, Great Britain, and Palestine, to name a few, who were positively benefitting from the presence of community gardens and local food in their neighborhoods. Many people in these studies were attracted to the community gardens because their identity was valued and they could connect with other people who were oppressed for similar identity traits. More than just food, the gardens all seemed to be about community development and connections between neighbors. After reading numerous articles during the first half of the quarter that were smiting the Slow Food Movement, I was surprised to find all these resources praising the effects of alternative agriculture for historically oppressed people.

I later realized that the majority of articles that were opposed to Slow Food and alternative agriculture were written in the United States. As a country, the majority of us seem to see local food as an elitist product, and at times, it certainly is. However, it is clear that this argument is all about perception, and in many cases, nationalism. While there are certainly local food movements that capitalize on elitist ideologies, more so on a global level are led by oppressed farm workers that work for the expansion of local food because they cannot economically compete with industrialized agriculture.

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