I am hungry. & thirsty.

Today is Yom Kippur- the Day of Atonement for Jews. I guess it is a bit ironic to talk about food today since I haven't eaten or drank anything since about 6pm yesterday, but I wanted to take this opportunity to talk about the cultural importance of food.

Yom Kippur is one of many Jewish traditions that have to do with food. Traditionally, we fast from sundown to sundown and use the time for intense prayer and reflection. The goal is to repent for your sins and seek forgiveness in this first week of the new Jewish year.

The reason for fasting is that it is meant to improve one's ability to focus on repentance. It is considered a physical pleasure that prevents spiritual elevation. The other physical pleasure that are forbidden are sex, washing, wearing of leather, dealing with money, and applying lotions. Because all Jewish holidays involve food, the fast is ended with a HUGE break fast after evening services.

One of the things that is interesting about food is that while it is a necessity for life, it can also bring such immense pleasure. Many cultures use food to celebrate holidays and societies gather around food. Today, as I am abstaining from eating, I have been thinking about how much food really does enrich our lives.

I watched tv last night with my roommates and one of the more difficult things for me was to not grab a taste of someone's dinner or join in when people are eating snacks. It is so accepted in our society that any sort of social gathering is accompanied by food and drinks for everyone to share. Of course there are evolutionary reasons for this. Sharing food when food was scarce was the best way for people to survive, so genes which made it more likely for phenotypes where sharing of food was common were selected for, and so on and so forth. Furthermore, I recently have been learning about the strong role of smell and taste in social bonding, so this sort of neurological basis definitely exists.

Ok, I'm off to read Farmer Boy, the easiest homework I have since it is hard to focus on something more complex. Easy fasting to all the Jewish people out there.

Jenna

Eat meat?

Today we fed pigs and chickens and spent an hour peeling garlic to find the healthy bulbs for planting. Feeding the animals made me think about eating meat and how abstract the actual living, breathing animals are when you are enjoying chicken parm or a cheeseburger or something. I was a vegetarian for pretty much all of 2007- mostly because of the sustainability issues and antibiotics in our meat- but those cute little pigs butting me with their noses made me rethink my decision to start eating meat again.

I originally began eating meat again because I spent the spring in Italy and knew that it would be extremely difficult and often insulting to Europeans if I refused to eat meat while there- especially since all of my meals were prepared for me by the Italian family that ran my pensione (bed and breakfast sort of place where I lived). When I came home, I quit eating red meat (the beef industry is terrible and I don't really enjoy red meat that much to begin with), but I am still eating tons of chicken these days.

We watched a short clip in class about a dairy farm where the cows were pretty much milk machines and it seemed very unnatural and wrong. I mean, I guess we all are here for some mechanical purpose- even humans- but I feel that every living thing deserves some sort of freedom- imagined or real- to do things that it enjoys. Raising animals in cruel conditions with every aspect of their lives directed towards the goal of food just seems immoral.

One of the best parts of farming today was when we all sat around the crates of garlic and talked about the social climate at Colgate and the problems we have with the university. Common Thread really provides an escape from the bubble where we can take ourselves out of the hectic lives we are living and sort of reflect on their validity.

I'm going to go eat some vegetarian dinner now. Ciao.

-Jenna

Cabbage Patches and Sugar

So it was day two at the farm today. I learned that I am extremely lucky to be in the Thursday group (other groups go on Wednesdays and Fridays) because Thursdays are when they have their shop for the community members with shares, so we get to harvest a little bit of everything including those things that need to be harvested day-of in order to stay fresh. So today I did spinach, beets, cabbage, onions, and zucchini.



As far as the actual labor went, cabbages are by far my favorite food to pick because its like a little present inside this big leafy plant and they never touch the dirt so they are very clean. See picture of cabbage plant here:
So that was exciting. I definitely felt a little more at home today on the farm since I already knew how to wash out the buckets, stack vegetables in the crates, and ride on the back of the truck without falling off. It really is a beautiful way to start out your morning- close to nature with a lot of time to reflect on the day- but I can't imagine how Chris and Amy do this all day, every day, for most of the year.

Jasper is this cool chick in maybe her late 20s who has been working on the farm and is leaving in a week. We were talking to her about how shes gotten so into farming, and she mentioned how financially unlucrative the job is and how it is more about the lifestyle. I definitely get the allure of a more simple lifestyle, especially when mine is so busy and chaotic.

So- back to reflecting on food- I had gained 15 pounds living in Italy last spring (seriously) because I lost my mind and indulged in pasta and wine pretty much 24/7. I then went health-crazy and lost it all this summer with the help of a personal trainer and a very strict diet. So I had been eating pretty healthy for a long time, but with the stress of school sort of fell off of the bandwagon this past week.

ANYWAY, today was the first day of me trying to get back on track. I did pretty well minus a donut because our Professor Chris Henke brought them in for our Food class discussion on sugar(Chris- if you are reading this THANKS FOR THAT). Today I ate pretty well and made a delicious salad for dinner since farming gets me in the mood for raw veggies... but nobody really cares about my diet, so back to more relevent things...

I am currently drinking a coffee with two sugars (real sugar because we were talking about it today) and an iced caramel macchiato with more sugar. We've been reading Sweetness and Power in class, which is a book about the history of sugar and how it has become such a major part of our lives. It is definitely true that on the average day I consume large amounts of sugar without really thinking much of it.

Well, I'm going to do some other work before this sugar/caffeine high wears off. Until next week...

Jenna

FARM!

So I went to the farm today and absolutely loved it. The weather was perfect and it was amazing to escape to such a natural, serene place for three hours in the early morning. At first it felt a bit like I was Paris Hilton on Simple Life- not that I'm a ditzy heiress, but I just felt a bit out of place. Yet as soon as we started harvesting leeks and I got a little dirt under my fingernails, it felt extremely natural.

We spent the morning harvesting and washing leeks, squash, cabbage, beets and celeriac (celery root). The leeks were fun because we had to chop off the tops of them with this really satisfying like swinging knife-chop. One of the most dissapointing vegetables was definitely beets, because the majority of them had mice damage or were too small to be of any use. Celeriac is this weird ugly thing that I had never even heard of... this is what it looks like:

The most interesting part of working on the farm was definitely talking to Amy, one of the two owners/farmers. She is too cute in her overalls and little pregnant belly and extremely personable. Hearing her story about how her and Chris, her husband, became involved in farming was just really fascinating. Both are first-generation farmers and children of businessmen/white-collar families that didn't initially approve of the concept. It was just really satisfying to see that two people could turn away from the materialistic, distant world we live in and follow their passion to create local, organic food and connect with nature.

I think the connection with nature is really what makes Common Thread such a great place. Amy was talking about how members of the farm joined for a plethora of different reasons. Some did join simply for the food, but a lot of people love the ambiance of the area or the concept of buying local food and knowing where it came from. Others do it for their children, who love the chickens, pigs, and carrots (local kids are obsessed with Common Thread carrots).

The past few decades have seen the dot-com boom and a technological whirlwind of ways to keep people connected. I used to call my parents from a pay phone in middle school if I was going to come home late, and now 3 year olds can navigate the applications on my blackberry. While technology has undoubtedly made us more connected to each other, the connections are somehow more artificial and distant. I have 1000 faceboook friends but now need facebook to remember my best friend's birthday. I think this trend towards depersonalization might finally be ending, with people realizing the importance of real connections with this real world that we live in. The popularity of Common Thread is evidence of this- our community is beginning to seek a connection with the earth and environment that we have been ignorantly destroying for far too long.

I'm going to eat some dinner now. Salad- no microwave! Yay food.

-Jenna

Food Diary: The Prologue

I think about it all the time.

All. The. Time. And I know that I'm not alone. Obsessing over food is pathological in this society we live in, where body image is absolutely everything. I would love to say I'm better than that--enlightened somehow. But that just isn't the world we live in. People like attractive, fit, thin people. As a psychology major, I know all the data to back that up. Especially in a place like this, an elite, predominantly-White, liberal arts institution, body image is on everyone's mind.

As part of my CORE 311: Food class, we are required to blog about our relationship and experiences with food throughout the semester, especially on days when we work our 3 hour internship at Common Thread, a local farm. Common Thread is a CSA which stands for Community Supported Agriculture. Pretty much, people buy shares at the beginning of the season and then divide up the crops that are produced that year. Therefore, the costs are covered even if a crop gets destroyed by disease or weather, and thus the sucesses of the farm bring more food to the shareholders, but failures don't seriously impact the livelihoods of Chris and Amy (the farmers). Common Thread is set on 16 acres and is absolutely beautiful (see picture below).

I'll be going there today at 2 for a tour, so I figured this would be a good day to start talking about my relationship with food... because like most American females, food has been my worst enemy, best friend, and one of the more frustrating aspects of my life. But as much as a I love talking about myself, you'll find out my story soon enough I'm sure. This diary is about Food in its many contexts- political, economical, psychological, and cultural. I'll undoubtedly give inordinate attention to the latter two, given my academic interests, but stay tuned for what should hopefully be a fairly interesting discourse on Food from the girl who microwaves the majority of her meals.

-Jenna