Return from the Food Intensive!

This past week students, teachers, and a couple of lucky interns traveled around California exploring food systems in depth. Students have been studying all the threads that make up the complex web of food: the process of farming and its environmental ramifications, the treatment of people who grow food, the viability of different models of farms, the way schools educate children about food and nutrition, and the possibilities for a sustainable and secure food future.

The trip started off with a bang in Nevada City where Lierre Keith, author of The Vegetarian Myth (http://www.vegetarianmyth.com/) gave a talk about her new book, meat consumption, health, and how to build up soil while grazing animals instead of depleting topsoil with monoculture industrial agriculture.

The next morning commenced on our very own campus with a tour by Malaika, our fantastic garden manager (and mother to a three week old baby) and one of the founders of The People's Grocery. (Check them out at http://www.peoplesgrocery.org/). Next we headed up the hill to talk to Jerome, our resident dairy farmer and provider of raw milk who told us about grazing cattle sustainably.

Over the week we saw so much: small organic chicken farms (http://soleilfarm.net/), amazing elementary garden programs, high school garden programs that employ students during the school day and afterwards, giving them meaningful, enriching work and a rich outdoor classroom. We visited Hayward Community Garden, a space that uses P.G.&E. land under power lines to grow over five acres of food. Many of the people who have plots in the garden come from all over the world and grow their plants with techniques most of us had never seen before: huge cacti abundantly blooming next to scallions from Afghanistan that look like common grass and relied on flood-irrigation.

We munched on grapes and juicy strawberries as we toured the warehouse of Veritable Vegetable, (http://www.veritablevegetable.com/) one of the first distributors of organic produce. They also have a history of providing women with opportunities in the workplace and offered an interesting look into the distribution side of both local and international agriculture. 

One night we visited the Berkeley farmer's market, where students bought fresh ingredients and competed in an Iron-Chef challenge that resulted in a most tasty of dinners. Another night we feasted at the Davis farmer's market (http://www.davisfarmersmarket.org/), where we were entertained by a huge marching band performance. We ended that night with a dance party in front of the rock band that plays there weekly. (Those people seriously know how to have a farmer's market....)

Occidental Arts and Ecology Center (http://www.oaec.org/) was an amazingly beautiful stop where we munched a quick lunch as we toured their large and colorful perennial gardens, vegetable garden space, the yurts in which interns live, and the cottage they just built as an experiment with natural building materials like cob and hay bales.

Looking through another lens into the world of food, we traveled to UC Davis and received an extremely interesting presentation on biotechnology and genetic modification of seeds, and how their seed lab sees GMO crops as the one truly viable way of feeding the ever-growing world population (read about them at http://sbc.ucdavis.edu/research/Bradford_Lab_Bios.htm). While on campus we walked through the beef barn and learned about large-scale beef and dairy production, and also spoke to scientists and farmers who were studying the difference between using antibiotics on cattle and natural treatments such as garlic oil. We also visited their on-campus organic farm (http://studentfarm.ucdavis.edu/) and had a lively discussion with the garden manager about what the word "organic" means as opposed to what we would like it to mean.

While at Davis we also walked through the Meat Lab (http://animalscience.ucdavis.edu/facilities/meat.htm) where slaughter takes place and meat is sold. We saw machinery, walked through the whole process, and were able to ask many questions of our teacher.

We ended the trip with a tour of Full Belly Farm (http://www.fullbellyfarm.com/), a family-run three hundred acre organic farm that has a CSA program, supplies Whole Foods and other grocery stores, and even has summer camps. We loved tasting almonds and figs right off their trees!

The week was a jam-packed, phenomenal trip, and now that students are back at school they are reflecting in class about what they learned. Hopefully over this week some of their responses will be up for you all to read!