Blog Topic: Internship
With the students away on the Food Intensive, four intrepid interns have stayed behind with one thing on our minds: food. Preservation, that is. This week we’ve kept ourselves busy with preserving our bounteous harvest while the students have been away, resulting in cans upon cans of tomatillo salsa, tomato sauce, and blackberry jam.
Our mornings this week have begun with harvesting in the garden, before the heavy heat of midday hits. We then weigh the produce and load up the newly repaired garden cart (thanks Lewis!) and walk barefooted across the grass to the Dining Hall. There the processing and preserving blitzkrieg begins. We bombard the kitchen haphazardly, and yet somehow after a few hours we’re lovingly placing another armful of sealed Mason jars onto the shelves in the pantry. Other adventures this week have included catfish wrangling (Doug and Red have been draining Mel’s Pond), eggplant carving, melon taste-testing, garden class with local six year olds, and several blissful trips to the Yuba River. We’ve experimented with eating produce straight off the plant after being inspired by two-year-old Althea’s no-handed, ruthless cabbage eating in the garden. Verdict: strawberries really are better on the vine. We’ve also at last come to a decision on the name for the newly formed contra band, made of banjo player/cow-op intern Alice, mandolin player/community intern Aaron, guitarist Graeme and bassist Colman, both of whom are current students. The band has been affectionately dubbed “Brosenberg” after the much-discussed founder of Nonviolent Communication.
Between the backpacking trip and the food intensive, it feels like this semester has been more adventure than routine. Regardless, we’ve developed a strong sense of community here on campus, and it feels strange to have the students gone. Yes, we’ll miss the peace and quiet—and immensely available West Side bathrooms—but it’ll be nice to have them back. We’re also excited for classes to resume again: as refreshing as it has been spending long hours in the garden and dreaming of eating salsa in the winter, it’ll be great to continue delving deeper into the larger-world issues of social justice, peace and sustainability.
I appreciate these two poems most when I read them together.
The Life of a Day
by Tom Hennen
Like people or dogs, each day is unique and has its own personality quirks which can easily be seen if you look closely. But there are so few days as compared to people, not to mention dogs, that it would be surprising if a day were not a hundred times more interesting than most people. But usually they just pass, mostly unnoticed, unless they are wildly nice, like autumn ones full of red maple trees and hazy sunlight, or if they are grimly awful ones in a winter blizzard that kills a lost traveler and bunches of cattle. For some reason we like to see days pass, even though most of us claim we don’t want to reach our last one for a long time. We examine each day before us with barely a glance and say, no, this isn’t one I’ve been looking for, and wait in a bored sort of way for the next, when, we are convinced, our lives will start for real. Meanwhile, this day is going by perfectly well adjusted, as some days are, with the right amounts of sunlight and shade, and a light breeze scented with a perfume made from the mixture of fallen apples, corn stubble, dry oak leaves, and the faint odor of last night’s meandering skunk.
A Ritual to Read to Each Other
by William Stafford
If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.
For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.
And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.
And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider--
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.
For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give--yes or no, or maybe--
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
Hoeing
by John Updike
I sometimes fear the younger generation will be deprived
of the pleasures of hoeing;
there is no knowing
how many souls have been formed by this simple exercise.
The dry earth like a great scab breaks, revealing
moist-dark loam--
the pea-root's home,
a fertile wound perpetually healing.
How neatly the green weeds go under!
The blade chops the earth new.
Ignorant the wise boy who
has never performed this simple, stupid, and useful wonder.
Responses:
This upcoming Saturday from 10-3 will be the Harvest Festival, a day of celebration, work in the garden, tasty seasonal lunch, and finally music and dancing!
At the festival we will all work together to ready the land for a new garden. If you haven't had a chance to get your hands dirty recently, I highly recommend it, as Malaika pointed out in her recent blog post, working in the dirt increases the mood. A poem by Marge Piercy sums up the deep joy that comes from the type of work we'll be doing on Saturday:
To Be Of Use by Marge Piercy
The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.
I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.
I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.
The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.
We will also be feasting on delicious seasonal foods, fiddling on our instruments, stomping our boots all around the dance floor, indulging in dessert decadence and generally making merry. I don't think any poetic explanation is needed for why you should come partake in those... Hope to see you on Saturday!
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!
Responses:
Petrified opossum found under the cedar house...
The mama and baby wild turkeys crossing the bridge.
Loose cow attacking the wisteria!
Responses:
It’s that amazing period of time at the end of hot summer in the Sierras when the blackberries drip off the branches, tomatoes pull down the vines, and strawberries send runners all over their beds.
In the thick of the harvest season, we’ve been thinking here about what it means to be truly sustainable and wanting to challenge ourselves to as an institution to take our sustainability to the next level. We grow much of our own food, but it turns out that feeding forty people three times a day necessitates quite a bit of food-- especially when half those people are seventeen year olds.
So instead of letting our need for enough pb&js stray from our goal of sustaining ourselves, we’ve decided to undertake the project of preserving as much of the bounty here as possible, in the form of jams, frozen veggies, jars of pesto, apple butter....
As I write this I sit by a large pot of blackberries burbling into jam and syrup on the stove, waiting for the jam to get hot and thick enough for me to pour into glass jars to can. Stirring the pot, I keep wondering: how much of our own food can we harvest and preserve if we work on it daily? Could we sustain ourselves for the whole winter? The whole year? Most importantly, what flavor of jam will be the tastiest in February: strawberry rhubarb lime or vanilla blackberry?
In an age when companies recall peanut butter due to salmonella scares, I feel lucky to be learning more about how to take advantage of what is growing around me, and empowered to actually know how. Lots of other folks know a lot more than I do, so if you’re interested in canning or preserving some jam yourself, here are some awesome sites to check out:
The recipe I’ve been using makes about eight quarts of jam. Feel free to scale this down for more normal proportions. (Many folks make fantastic jams with just a 1:1 berry to sugar ratio and nothing else, if you’re a purist.)
- 36 cups of blackberries
- 10 cups of sugar
- juice from 2 lemons
Directions: Mash up the blackberries in a huge pot. Cook over medium heat, thickening and reducing the berry mash. Add in lemon juice. Bring to a low boil, then add the sugar. Stir constantly and continue to thicken. Finally bring to a rolling boil that cannot be stirred down for at least a minute. Then you’re ready to pour into cans for preserving, or just put it in the fridge to eat soon.
We’ve made about twenty quarts thus far, with buckets full of berries still waiting in the fridge…. We’ll see how many batches we make before all of our hands are permanently purple!
Responses:
On Friday nights, why not get dressed up-- however you want to interpret that-- and learn how to make some challah?
