Although my focus was ‘Food Studies’ at The Evergreen State College, I’m not an aspiring chef. I’m not the kind of person whose friends rave about how I should open a restaurant. In fact, I’m awkward in the kitchen. My knife skills need work and I prefer to cook alone with nobody watching. What I do love about food is how it can bring people together and has the ability to change lives, communities, and even the world. Nothing makes me happier than sharing good food, with good people. So, I think what really encompasses my time here at Evergreen is macaroni and cheese. Macaroni and cheese is a symbol for where I started and how far I’ve come in my education. Before Evergreen, my life was similar to the boxed macaroni I adored to eat as a child. I had materialistic and industry processed dreams of being an editor for Vogue Magazine. Through my time at Evergreen, my life was completely changed for the better and I became a different version of macaroni and cheese. I became the macaroni and cheese I cooked with my group during a ‘sauces and emulsions’ food lab; which was a recipe assigned from the pages of Cooks Illustrated, The Science of Good Cooking to demonstrate chemical bonds.
Terroir: Chocolate, Oysters, and Other Place-Flavored Foods was the bouquet garni; a combination of studying many place-based flavor foods that laid the foundation for the rest of my academic career and began my interest in food. I learned the importance of taste, flavor, ethical sourcing, and how each product is made. My internship at OmNom Chocolate in Reykjavik, Iceland acted on me as a food processor, blending all my knowledge together into a single field: bean-to-bar chocolate. Although the macaroni is often seen as a filler, it is an enriching part of the meal. That is what my one quarter of Bodies Speaking Out: Public Health and Community through the Lenses of Science, Ethnography, and Media was for me. The macaroni of my educational career, it provided another perspective into the food industry by showing me the unjust reality lived by migrant farm workers. The class not only showed me who was harvesting my food, but also taught me how to use archives and the basic concepts of epidemiology. Something was missing though and I yearned to continue in my study of food.
Food, Health, and Sustainability was my answer and my roux: providing a base for creating thicker sauces with two quarters of intensive biology and food science. The second quarter provided a springboard for future opportunities due to the fermentation-based curriculum. My internship at Wingman Brewers was the salt added to the dish; enhancing the knowledge I already had with more in depth and hands on experience relating to fermentation and brewing beer. My summer independent learning contract added a cheese topping to the mix; adding more to what I already knew, expanding my depths of knowledge. The focus was on “good, clean, and fair food,” which included site visits to farms, breweries, distilleries, and farm-to-table restaurants as well as the 2017 Slow Food Nations Conference. An opportunity presented itself to re-connect my education with cacao through the Food, Fermentation, and Feminism Conference at McGill University in Montreal. My presentation as part of a panel on the Epistemology of Food Knowledge became the basis for my Senior Capstone Project.
My last quarter was spent being cooked (like the chickpea in Rumi’s poem) by my participation in Countertextual Ecologies: GastroPoetics. Here, I finally had the opportunity not only to learn from Tasting Labs but to make my own. Creating a Tasting Lab based on a chapter from our text, Mouthfeel: How Texture Makes Flavor, was an immersive way to let my creativity steep through beef liver, soylent, and natto. The completion of my Senior Capstone Project was based on field work with Dr. Skip Bittenbender at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, also allowed me to have a finished product that truly was interdisciplinary, including science, art, and poetry. With my metaphorical meal finally complete, its easy to reflect on how far I’ve come since my days of boxed macaroni and how all of my programs blend together to create an artisanal dish. It is a dish that will sustain me as I continue to learn, be inspired, and give back to my community… beginning with a job making udder to cone ice cream and chocolate in New Jersey at Brick Farm.