The Yale Sustainable Food Project

A couple weeks ago I had the pleasure–with a number of YSFP staffers, Yale faculty members and...

Mon, 20 May 2013 13:28:32 -0400

A couple weeks ago I had the pleasure–with a number of YSFP staffers, Yale faculty members and students–of sharing a breakfast with Michael Pollan, god of all things food related. For the majority of the breakfast, I cowered in the corner of the table, afraid to arrogantly assume I might have something to add. But I did finally work up the courage to ask him a question, one related to a topic I think about a lot when it comes to considering recent changes in American gastro-culture.

We’ve all probably seen at least a bit of Top Chef. Maybe that’s just an assumption I’m making to rationalize my period of obsession in high school- it was my “Untextable Hour.” I stopped watching when I decided that they just weren’t showing enough of the actual food. But I’ve always assumed that the proliferation and popularization of cooking shows, be they competitions, travel shows, or demonstrations could at worst have a neutral effect on food culture in America, and at best could get Americans thinking more about how fun and satisfying it can be to cook. I assumed they were slowly priming us to go cook more, since we already model so much of what we do based on what we see on TV. But I wanted someone else’s take on this theory, so I sheepishly asked Mr. Pollan for his thoughts.

His answer was simple and in retrospect, very unsurprising. His response was basically that TV is designed for one thing, and that’s to keep people watching TV. Not anything else. So even if I end up making myself a sandwich instead of peeling open a Lunchable after watching some Hells’ Kitchen it’s probably not indicative: I’m an outlier, or someone who would have gotten up to make the sandwich myself anyway.

I’m sure there are valid counterarguments to this idea- what about documentaries? Newscasts? TV has been used effectively to motivate people often throughout history in some absurd ways. But to me it presented a more basic lesson, one that sits comfortably in between both theories: always seek to know why you’re doing whatever it is you’re doing, and whether you’re doing them for the right reasons.

There are many ways to be a conscious and responsible consumer of food, and obviously certain ones are more palatable or possible for certain people (in my house, we call Whole Foods “Whole Paycheck”). And if one of those ways is reinspiring yourself to cook periodically by tuning in to Top Chef, then more power to you! To not do that would be dumb. It’s clear is that dogmatic idealism and unrealistic expectations are just as, if not more harmful than getting a little distracted every once and a while.

At the same time, in our search for a better way to interact with our food, it’s important to not trick ourselves and let that distraction develop into inaction. Let’s make sure that we don’t get stuck feeling like we’ve done our duty when we buy an organic bunch of bananas, or judge others for their TV choices while we congratulate ourselves for being gluten-free locavores. If we’re going to choose to care about this issue, let alone work to improve things, then it’s important we don’t get stuck rationalizing and settling, or judging and proselytizing. If we all find the best way to be involved, and remember to think critically about our involvement, then we’ve taken the hardest and most important step forward. Even if that step takes you back onto the couch.

-John Gerlach, ‘14

Most of my friends spent their spring break flying south, migrating to white beaches or service...

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 14:11:58 -0400

Most of my friends spent their spring break flying south, migrating to white beaches or service trips in the outskirts of jungles. I spent my spring break being pulled north by the smokey, sweet lure of my family’s sugaring operation.

Late winter, early spring at my home in Western New York is a time of tradition. I know that tradition is an overused word, but it really is the only one that remotely describes what pushes my dad to spend his summers sweatily cutting down tress for sugaring fuel, and his winters freezing his fingers while untangling sculptures of knotted tubing. Tradition is what brings my family together around the evaporator for a night filled with Bob Dylan crooning from the scratchy radio and savory sugar-house specials: a steaming shot of almost-done syrup and dark Haitian rum.

In my dad’s younger days of three braids and hitchhiking, he picked up a long church pew in his travels. I doubt he knew where it would fit into his life then, but it has its place now. It stretches along the back wall of the sugar house, engraved into perfect seat cradles by the many neighbors, family members, dogs, and strangers who have found the warmth of conversation and syrup upon it.

Syrup is the embodiment of the power to connect. It quite literally connects itself. Syrup has boiled to completion when its stickiness is strong enough to hold it in a connected curtain across the edge of a special metal scoop. It connects recipes. Add a dash of syrup and I swear that everything in your recipe will come together perfectly. It connects generations. Your grandma might not recognize high fructose corn syrup, but I bet she understands the sweetness of maple syrup! Syrup brings together people, and ideologies, and animals. Sugar houses provide a space to take the time. To sit down next to someone with no agenda in mind and connect. Maybe to talk, but maybe to just sit in steam and sip.

Favorite and Simple MacKenzie Family Maple Syrup Recipes:

*The Favorite, Tried and True Spoon (or as my dad calls it: his medicine): All you need is maple syrup and a table spoon (or even a tea spoon.) Fill the spoon with syrup and drink. Feel free to refill as many times as you desire.

*Maple Grapefruit: If you like a bit of sweetness with your grapefruit, ditch the sugar and pour on the syrup. I guarantee you’ll never go back!

*Sap Coffee: Make coffee like you normally do but replace the water with sap. It adds subtle, but wonderful flavor and you won’t even need to add any extra sugar!

*The Sugar House Special: A shot with half warm syrup and half dark rum. Sip so you don’t burn yourself!

-Onagh MacKenzie ‘15

Maybe, Someday Farmers: Voices of the Student Interns on the Yale Farm

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 13:24:00 -0400

Maybe, Someday Farmers: Voices of the Student Interns on the Yale Farm:

Student farm manager interns at the Yale farm straddle two worlds: one of academics and one of hands-on agriculture. But are these two worlds as divorced as they once seemed? These student farm managers seem to suggest that farm-life and college-ambitions might actually be able to coexist.

A radio piece by Shizue RocheAdachi ‘15 on integrating academia and agriculture.

Sophie Mendelson ‘15 reflects on the idea of homecoming after attending The Berry Center...

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 13:01:06 -0400

Sophie Mendelson ‘15 reflects on the idea of homecoming after attending The Berry Center Conference in Louisville, KY:

Wendell Berry speaks reverently of homecoming. Slowly and deliberately, stretching vowels into multiple syllables and soaking his verbal contours in Kentucky drawl, he describes the knowledge that one comes by through growing up in a place, absorbed through osmosis from family and the character of the land. The strength of these bonds of personal history, Berry insists, are unparalleled, and should be respected, nurtured, and tended to with care. Love for a place and a way of life that you know so profoundly that “knowing” takes on a whole new meaning – that is home. And that is where we should be striving to return, prodigal sons making our way back to the family farm. It is the point of origin that we seek.

I sit leaning forward in my chair, pen paused in my note taking, cheeks flushed. Yes, yes, yes! I am ready to leap to my feet, to fall in line behind this wise man, to wave a flag of homecoming and march until I have found it, my home, my point of origin. We – the agriculturally-minded youth of my generation – will reclaim the land and sink our roots so deep into the ground that our bonds of affection and knowledge will form a subterranean system with strength to parallel Wes Jackson’s perennial grasses, holding the rural landscape secure against the erosion of our resources and our values. I am ready to join the movement, to begin my journey back… To what? This is where I hit a snag in my grandiose plans.

Wendell Berry celebrates the importance of “education for homecoming” – and it is a very literal homecoming that he describes, to a physical space once inhabited, to the people and the place that raised you. But what about those for whom “home” is not a ranch or a farm, but a city block, or a suburban housing development? What about those of us who know in our bones – not how to tend to a sick cow, or how to know that it is time to get the crops in the ground – but how to navigate a subway system with our eyes shut, or how to parallel park on a curved street in a space that appears to be only half the length of the car? I grew up in a dilapidated suburb of Washington, DC, and while there is farming in my family, I reach out to those rural roots from the distance of several generations. My memory of the land as my home is not a memory, but a post-memory, a consciously constructed “recollection” that is one part history, two parts research, and seven parts imagination. And I am not unique in my predicament. In fact, it appears that the vast majority of the “we” falling into step behind Wendell Berry’s call to action are more familiar with concrete than with soil. How, then, do we come home to the rural home that we know is ours, but that we have never yet visited?

In order to succeed, Wendell Berry must make room in his vision of homecoming for those of who are undertaking a figurative, rather than a literal, homecoming. And there must be infrastructure in place to help us to build, rather than simply return, home. We do not have the advantage of lifelong exposure to generations of farming knowledge, and so we need training – and lots of it. We do not have the advantage of an inheritance of family land, and so we need help finding – and acquiring – land to call our own. We are not already part of rural communities, and so we need points of entry into the social support systems that such communities afford. In short, we are agricultural orphans, and we need adopting.

Given the state of farming today in the United States, such an untraditional construction of heritage might be just what is needed, not just for incoming farmers, but for outgoing ones as well. The vast majority of farmers in America are over the age of fifty – and most of them do not have children who want to take up the family trade. If these farmers want their land to stay in production and out of the hands of agribusiness, they need to find surrogate “children” to carry on their work once they can no longer do so. Older farmers are in need of inheritors; younger farmers are in need of inheritances – now we just need a way to find each other! Programs in which farmers-in-training apprentice to older farmers with the promise of knowledge transfer and the possibility of land transfer down the line – this is the ideal training structure for us agricultural orphans, and it provides older farmers with the opportunity to preserve the legacy and heritage of their land and their way of life, even if it is not through biological means.

So yes, let’s return home – but let’s expand the meaning of the term “homecoming” to include the homes we make and the homes we find and the homes we resurrect from scattered bits and pieces. Because if home is something that you know so profoundly that “knowing” takes on a whole new meaning, then it’s also something that you can learn – right?

I’m currently lucky enough to be enrolled in the class...

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 11:10:00 -0400

I’m currently lucky enough to be enrolled in the class “Urbanization and the Environment in China and India”, which included a spring break trip to Guangdong Province and New Delhi. As part of the class, I’m working on a group research project about meat availability and changing diets in China and India.

Our research entailed visits to various types of markets in both countries—a fascinating process that allowed us to consider both food production and supply, and social and cultural practices. One major theme: even though urban diets have changed and are changing in both countries, becoming increasingly processed and industrialized, fresh markets remain the vibrant norm.

Even more fundamentally, I observed in both places a difference in attitude, compared to the US, towards food shopping in general. Most basic staples remain unbranded, which isn’t to say that industrial food isn’t present—it’s just that meat that is produced industrially is not as commonly sold under a brand name like Tyson.

Thus, in both China and India, “consumer choice” in food still implies very physical, very real choice. Rather than choosing between brands and abstracted concepts of food—in the US, the premise of our industrial food system is that one Tyson chicken breast is indistinguishable from another—people rely on their senses, experience with the seller, and personal judgment to select precisely the food that looks best to them. Even in the Chinese supermarkets we visited, people pick through trays of chicken wings, and the plastic-covered Styrofoam package of six chicken breasts remains the exception rather than the norm. Although this kind of shopping may create anxiety about food safety, I think it also points to an attitude that doesn’t consider it elitist to invest time and effort in procuring quality food.

-Abigial Bok, ‘14

Singing and Cooking Together Over spring break, Redhot &...

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 11:00:43 -0400

Singing and Cooking Together

Over spring break, Redhot & Blue, my a cappella group came to my hometown of Rochester, New York. Our favorite activities of the week were singing and cooking. From singing in a church full of hundreds of people to filling hundreds of won-ton wrappers with squash, our week was full of joy. Singing and cooking are both forms of communication that transcend words, fostering a sense of community in creating something together.

These moments of singing and cooking don’t just happen. To sing together, everyone must learn the words and the notes; someone has to give the tempo and lead the group. To cook together, someone has to plan the menu and find ingredients; everyone must suppress hunger while doing his part to prepare the meal. In our modern world, music comes from iPods and food comes from take-out containers. Current food movements encourage local food that is grown sustainably and prepared with care. Many people believe in this mission; yet, they don’t pursue it often enough. Change in the food system starts in backyard gardens and bustling kitchens. Those seeking more than pad thai and the latest hit single have their work cut out for them.

-Katie Harmer ‘15

I lived alone for the first time last summer. I rented an...

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 11:00:31 -0400

I lived alone for the first time last summer. I rented an apartment in downtown Kampala with neat furniture, white tile floors, and a double-burner countertop stove. I pretended to be self-sufficient. A single roll of toilet paper, one kitchen knife: these were the things of independence. In the drawer underneath the TV I kept a small book for accounting. There were no bills to pay, but toothpaste, jars of peanut butter—these things added up.

The apartment had a toaster oven, too: a small one with red plastic dials, one whose temperature was variably precise. I liked this oven, though, and it was in it that I cooked my dinner, slices of orange squash quietly crisping to brown.

Curried Squash Soup
1 large green-skinned squash (bargain down to 2,000 shillings. You are being cheated, mizungu, if you pay any more)
Oil, the kind in the yellow jerry-can, canola?
3 small onions, chopped
2 cloves garlic, peeled and minced
Ginger, peeled and minced
1/8th packet curry powder, the good curry powder, from Nakasero market
1 can full-fat coconut milk, this week’s splurge
Salt

1. Plug in oven. Heat to high. Halve the squash, remove seeds, and chop into half-inch chunks using the sharp knife. Toss in cake pan, the only pan, with a spoonful of oil. Roast until tender.

2. Plug in stove. Place the large pot on the stove. Add another spoonful of oil, heat until hot. (Do not let the oil smoke. The vapor will condense on the bottom of the overhead cabinets and drip down the walls. This will annoy the landlords). Add chopped garlic, sautee until golden and fragrant. Add onions, sautee until translucent. Or until brown and caramelized. You have time for that.

3. Add garlic, curry powder, squash, coconut milk, a few teacup-fulls of water. Simmer until squash is so tender that it slips from its skin, or until the power turns off—whichever comes first.

4. Taste for salt; add salt; mash with a fork; pour into a bowl; bring it to the table and eat it while you type emails—emails to friends about the way the rain seeps in between the door and its frame, the way the puddles grow stale.

-Maya Binyam ‘15

Zoe Reich-Avillez ‘15, on how a favorite farm task transforms the mundane: I first worked on a...

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 13:42:20 -0400

Zoe Reich-Avillez ‘15, on how a favorite farm task transforms the mundane:

I first worked on a farm (rather, I first stepped foot on a farm) during my freshman year of high school. The trip to Gaining Ground was posted on a school bulletin board under “Community Service.” Gaining Ground, the sign proclaimed, is a non-profit farm that donates all its food to local food banks and meal programs. Located just ten minutes from my high school, it was the perfect destination for a mid-afternoon volunteer shift. Never one to turn down an outdoor field trip in early spring, I immediately signed up. Looking back now, the memories of that short shift are beyond foggy. What I do remember though, is the feeling of being engaged in manual work. I couldn’t articulate it then, but something just felt so right about working my hands through the soil and crouching over a bed of newly planted seedlings.

A year later, I heard about Gaining Ground’s summer internship. I had barely given my workday a second thought, but remembering that still-so-poignant feeling, I decided to apply. Through the summer, I weeded, planted, harvested, weeded, prepped beds, and weeded some more. As any farmer will tell you—and as I discovered that summer—there will always be more weeding.

For some reason though, I relished that never-ending task. What is often the bane of the farmhand’s existence became my favorite job: hand weeding. Massaging the soil, grasping for weeds, pulling the unwanted plants from their roots, and finally looking back to see a bed of head lettuce surrounded by dark brown soil, was deeply satisfying. I found myself looking forward to the days when I would be sent out to the field, with or without a partner, to weed for hours on end. Even now, when I crave a task that is comforting, that will re-orient me with myself, I crouch down in a pathway, dig my hands into the soil, and start to weed.

When I try to understand my love of hand weeding, I often turn to the physicality of the work. Search and pull, search and pull. So easily, I can lose myself in the repetition, in the sheer simplicity of the action. At my best though, it is not just my body put to work; my mind too, is engaged in that repetition and simplicity. When I say that I lose myself in the task then, I mean that I am completely and totally present. I’m reminded what it is to find home in myself. This groundedness, I now realize, is the feeling of “rightness” that I knew but couldn’t name during my first shift at Gaining Ground. Now, I know its name and I know it’s what keeps me coming back to the farm time and time again.

The Conservationist in the Clouds Hannah Sassoon, ‘15 Don...

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 11:00:00 -0400

The Conservationist in the Clouds

Hannah Sassoon, ‘15

Don Carlos was sitting on the porch when we arrived at Cuerici. We could smell a wood stove burning, and I thought for a moment that it was smoke hanging in the air around us—but it wasn’t dry, it was wet, and it didn’t rise or twist. It rolled under the roof trusses. A cloud. We joined Don Carlos on the porch. From leather rocking chairs and long log benches, we looked across the Talamanca mountains, breathless.

We could recognize the altitude by the flora, too. Compared to the tall palms and Heliconia we’d just seen in the rainforest, this looked like a temperate zone: oaks (Fagaceae), dogwoods (Cornaceae), blueberries (Ericaceae). We’d come to Costa Rica as botanists. Here, 2700 meters above sea level, we found a distinctive habitat: un bosque nublado, a cloud forest.

Cuerici is more than a biological station: it’s a trout farm, and it’s the home of Don Carlos. The land he stewards—including 200 hectares of primary forest, a blackberry farm, and a patchwork of impossibly steep cow pastures—straddles the top of a mountain. Its Atlantic face is wet, its Pacific face dry. Don Carlos’s family has lived here for generations.

The trout operation at Cuerici is less than twenty years old—the result of a government-sponsored economic development initiative. Rainbow trout in the cloud forest? It’s a good question. They’re nonnative, and a notoriously aggressive species. But Don Carlos’s truchas are well contained and integrated into the cycles of Cuerici.

At the base of the hill below the station is a small dug pond, divided down the middle into two squares. This is where Don Carlos keeps reproductive trout. They’re large—easily twenty-four inches long, most more like thirty. From the bank, we watch them swim around each other, dorsal fins gliding above the pond surface. Don Carlos is describing egg collection. With his thick fingers, he draws two vertical lines in the air. The fish have two sacs, he explains in Spanish. That’s where all the eggs are—hundreds, thousands. When they are ready, he captures the fish and massages their bellies to release the eggs. It’s a skill to know exactly when a fish is ready—something Don Carlos has learned over many seasons. He refuses to buy in eggs.

Up the hill is the hatchery, a dimly lit building. A stack of incubation shelves stands in one corner with water running over it all the time from a suspended pipe. Eggs incubate here for a month before Don Carlos moves the fish to small tanks, also in the hatchery. When they reach three centimeters in length, he moves them again, this time to one of the long, narrow, concrete tanks that run the length of the building. He doesn’t move them all together, though—he selects the hatchlings by size, one at a time. We watch Don Carlos climb onto the ledge above the concrete tanks. This water—he points down—comes from underground. It can’t have organic matter or sediment in it because particles can suffocate the fish at this stage.

Outside the hatchery is a row of larger tanks for juvenile trout. There are thousands of them, flipping and folding and forming schools. Most are sold at this size, four centimeters; the best are kept for breeding; the rest are kept for eating.

Don Carlos cleans the tanks twice a week. He puts the excrement in the compost to feed knotted piles of red worms, which he feeds, in turn, to the trout. He’s always looking to foster these sorts of cycles. Here, sustainability is not an ideology; it’s a necessity.

When Don Carlos’s grandparents moved to Cuerici Mountain, they slashed and burned to create pastures and gardens. They raised cows, they hunted, they felled the biggest trees, they made charcoal. And when the government outlawed deforestation in the 1970s, they began to sell their land, piece by piece, as pastures. Don Carlos saw the forest disappearing, and he decided, with eight friends, to buy the land. They still share it.

They’ve delineated their land use: part of the forest is a conservation site, another part is a reforestation site. Some areas are still cattle pasture (so the residents of Cuerici can have milk and manure); some are kept clear for blackberry bushes.

I’m criticized by conservationists, Don Carlos tells us, for having a cow, for having blackberries. But it isn’t so black and white: the point of land stewardship, he explains, is to balance conservation with human needs. Don Carlos lives by the idea of enough. Conserve what you can—it is enough. And take only what you need—it is enough. The problem, he says quietly, is when people want to make a lot of money from the land. That is more than enough; that is too much.

Behind the station, Don Carlos shows us a spread of palm seedlings—a hundred at least. It’s an edible species, so slow growing that it can take fifty, sixty, seventy years to reach maturity. When Don Carlos’s family first lived at Cuerici, these palms were everywhere. Now in the forest there remains only one.

The seedling project is an experiment. Don Carlos has propagated these palms, and he intends to plant them across the mountain. He knows he won’t live to learn their fate, much less to harvest them and eat them. But he is content as he leans on a bench and gazes at their light green fronds. This is enough.

Together, we head inside for lunch—trout. Above the station, clouds comb through the oaks, mixing with wood smoke.

Triple Bottom Line

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 14:30:00 -0400

by Sophie Mendelson, ‘15

So I have this crazy idea.

It’s an idea about what the farm of the future could look like. Big topic, I know, and right now the idea is still pretty half-baked, I’ll be the first to admit. It’s fanciful and incomplete, with untested foundations, erratically constructed extensions and a leaky roof. But seeing as it’s an idea about collaboration, and the first step toward any kind of collaboration is communication, I’m going to lay it out for you anyway.

This idea, like so many, starts with the identification of a problem: loneliness. I believe that loneliness is a problem that is often overlooked in the discussion surrounding sustainable, small-scale farming. When trying to envision the farm of the future, we spend a lot of time talking about economics and chemicals – how can farmers make a living? How can they reliably produce food without harmful technology? What new economic models and low-impact technologies can we implement? These are all important questions, but I think equally important is the question: how can we make the farming lifestyle sustainable? In other worlds, how can we help farmers not to be so darn lonely?

In my personal experience, loneliness has been THE NUMBER ONE hardest part of farming. Isolated geographically and socially, farming is often a solitary business. There is a huge difference between working fourteen-hour days with a group of people and working those same hours on your own, and I’m not just talking in terms of productivity. For me, the former is exhausting but satisfying, while the latter leaves me flattened and struggling to suppress a creeping sense of desperation. It’s no wonder that so many young farmers start out with enthusiasm only to quit after a couple of years in the field!

So here is my crazy idea: the farming cooperative. I may be twisting the word “cooperative” to fit my purposes here, because I don’t mean a totally consensus-based, commune-like farming model. What I have in mind is more closely matched to the Zingerman’s business model (check out A Lapsed Anarchist’s Approach to Building A Great Business by Ari Weinzweig if you’re intrigued). I’m talking about a farming model in which several quasi-independent farms, all located in the same geographic region or even the same property, collaborate to coordinate operations and market their products under one front. You could have, for example, a vegetable farm, a dairy farm, a meat farm, a fruit orchard, and a processing facility for value-added products that all run mostly independently from each other, but draw on each other for support and all market through the same outlet and under the same label.

In my idealized and untested fantasy version of this model, the farm cooperative would work to meet “the triple bottom line” (to steal, and then tweak, a phrase from Dina Brewster): economic, environmental, and spiritual. Economically, marketing through one outlet would provide consumers with an incentive to buy from the cooperative, as they could meet most of their grocery needs through the products collectively assembled. Environmentally, the cooperative model encourages a diversified farming approach, where multiple kinds of farming are all taking place in coordination with each other on one piece of property, allowing farmers to close nutrient cycles and feedback loops. And now here’s the biggie: spiritually, the cooperative addresses to major issues for farmers. First, it provides a built-in community. This model of farming necessitates the involvement of many families and many workers, de-isolating small-scale farmers and creating a social environment. Second, it makes it so that one farmer doesn’t have to keep track of everything that is going on in a diversified farm all by his or her self – each operation is managed by a separate set of people, who then collaborate to bring their operations in concert with each other, thus diffusing the responsibility and easing the need for manic multi-tasking. Oh yeah, and each operation can help out other operations during times of particular need, like harvesting tomatoes or slaughtering chickens, strengthening social bonds and reducing the need to bring in extra labor during these times.

So far, that is the extent of the crazy idea. I would love, love, LOVE to talk to people about this, so please don’t be shy! Help me poke some holes in this thing so that we can build it back up even stronger.

Kendra Dawsey ‘13 explores cultural culinary traditions in her own college kitchen: Over the...

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 13:19:00 -0400

Kendra Dawsey ‘13 explores cultural culinary traditions in her own college kitchen:

Over the summer that I spent working at the Yale Farm as a Lazarus intern, we grew collard greens. It was strange to grow something that I only knew as a food that my mother cooked on special events and holidays, or when she wanted to do something other than pasta. It was also strange hearing my fellow farmers call the big fans of leaves “collards” — putting emphasis on the d that my family always left out. It was a familiar food in a new space.

I didn’t realize how culturally tied I was to this food, and other staples in Black American/Southern food like cornbread, sweet potatoes, grits, and all the rest. It took me a while to realize that not everyone ate them. I didn’t do a particularly good job of absorbing these traditions of cooking either. Whenever my mother or grandmother was in the kitchen, I was doing homework or watching TV. This still goes on — over fall break, my mom shook a turkey leg and seasonings in my direction with the intent of teaching me, and I fended her off with staring at my computer screen and murmuring “I’m busy.”

This year is the first time that I’ve lived off campus at Yale and had to cook my own food on a regular basis. My first experiment with cooking the food I grew up eating was a sweet potato. Instead of calling my mother to ask for directions, I looked up a few recipes online, and then didn’t follow any of them. I tried cooking it with a friend and wounded up stabbing it with a fork, and then alternating between sticking it in the microwave and oven, and then hacking at the potato for it to cook faster. It was not a success.

I decided to try again with collard greens. I never watched my mother or grandmother cook them with a particular distinction — I only remember seeing the huge leafy greens fill the sink and then eating them a few hours later. Collard green can be a very laborious vegetable to cook — my grandmother in particular boils the collard greens for hours in a pot, leaving them sweet and buttery. Additionally, in typical Black American/Southern fashion, you cook it with leftover bacon fat and some ham. But being a busy college student, I didn’t have the time or ingredients for any of that. So I decided I would try my own sort of method for collard greens one Tuesday evening.

First, you clean the collard greens so that they are free of any dirt and debris. It is usually helpful to do it in a large sink, like a kitchen sink, but this one took place in a freshly scrubbed and rinsed bathroom.

Then, take the collards and remove them from the stalks. The leftovers should look like this.

Don’t worry, all of these greens will cook down really quickly!

Cut the collards into one inch pieces so that they are easier to handle, and then boil the collards in hot water for about fifteen minutes, or until they are soft and a vibrant green. Then strain to remove excess water.

Told you they cooked down!

Now, get a pan for sauteeing, and put in a tablespoon of both butter and olive oil, and then some chopped garlic to taste (I used about two cloves). Stir in the collard greens and add salt and pepper. Sautee them, stirring constantly, for about five minutes. Then remove from heat and add some lemon juice for a light tangy taste.

When I ate them, they tasted very similar to (but not quite like) the collard greens my mom made, and they took much less time to do! I’m glad that I found one more thing to cook that reminds me of home.

Ever year we face a conundrum: one of the most important tenets...

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 15:00:57 -0400

Ever year we face a conundrum: one of the most important tenets of Harvest is that it’s a break from the plugged-in technological world, and no one wants to bring a fancy digital camera along to dig in the dirt, but we need pictures of the trips! For our 2012 session we experimented by giving leaders and support crew disposable cameras and asking them to document what they did and saw. The results are hilarious and gorgeous and make us miss summer all over again. Above are some highlights— you can check out the rest on our Flickr page.

The Yale Farm, Hyperlinked

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 14:21:00 -0500

by Adam Goff ‘15

None of the tomato varieties grown at the Yale Farm are light blue. Our hoes, broadforks, seeders, and shovels aren’t blue either. The pizza oven is made of red bricks, the sinks shine a titanium silver. There are no blue eggplants, blue beets, blue compost piles, or blue weeds. Aside from a couple pairs of jeans, one or two blue harvest buckets, and the sky above us, the farm is blue-less.

Yet I often expect to see light blue hues on the farm to mark all of the hyperlinks. On Wikipedia, Facebook, and much of the web, light blue marks a hyperlinked word, which when clicked will whisk you to another article. I can hyperlink surf from a Wikipedia page on Cooking to an article on Caramelization and end up reading about Aminio Acids. Light blue text marks a portal from one idea to another.

On the farm I see these hyperlinks everywhere. Our Winter Mustard Greens link me to Season Extension which takes me to Canadian Hothouse Tomatoes and their Ecological Footprint. When I am Weeding my mind hops from Migrant Farm Labor to Unionization. I weigh fresh-picked Cabbages and wonder how to improve Yield Data Collection on Diversified Vegetable Farms.

I look at our one-acre urban farm and I see nested ideas and stories, one connected to the next connected to another, just waiting to be clicked on. So don’t be surprised if you dig up one of a Yale Farm potatoes and find it tinged light blue. Be curious, for that blue potato isn’t crawling with mold and disease. It is brimming with connections for you to explore. All you have to do is click.

Science, Pseudo-Science and Figuring Things Out

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 12:00:50 -0500

by Erin Vanderhoof ‘13

It’s generally surprising for people to hear that I’m a Women’s, Gender and Sexuality studies major and interested in eventually becoming a doctor. I’d say that I identify as both a scientist and a skeptic, and even though that might seem to make no sense, it says a lot about the nature of scientific knowledge. As a WGSS major I’ve learned about scientific knowledge that have really shaped the way I approach both science and working on the Farm.

My freshman year, I read Foucault for the first time, and felt my connection to science shift. Through Foucault, I learned that when we think about knowledge, we have to think of the sociocultural factors that affect how and why that knowledge is made. Essentially, when something is regarded as true, there is a cultural investment in making the “truth” that is different from (or even transcends) the materiality of facts. At a very fundamental level, science is a human institution, especially when commenting on humans, and it is governed by culture and by natural law, and the difference between them is always shifting. This is important because it reminds us that we have the power to push back against science when we think it is incomplete and attempt to create our own truths.

I’ve gone on this theoretical tangent because I wanted let you know that I’m not the only person who thinks science and skepticism can coexist, that it’s possible to be a person who acknowledges climate change and benefits from western medicine without necessarily taking every journal finding as received wisdomthe gospel. In fact, I think healthy skepticism is necessary to continued scientific knowledge.

But how does this all connect to food?

On the Yale Farm, we use organic practices (though not necessarily Certified Organic™) practices because we think it’s the most responsible choice for both human and environmental health and sustainability. The word “organic” means a multitude of things, and there are plenty of scientific studies that prove the benefits of organic practices and there are nearly as many claiming to disprove it. Though there is a perception in agriculture and science writing that organic enthusiasts are luddites, There are a wide variety of organic practices, yet it seems like sometimes they’re rejected as being unsupported by science or behind the times when compared to more “modern” agricultural practicesscience. I have to admit that I came to like the idea of organic on a gut feeling instead of totally understanding the science. [AR1] But the more I’ve delved into food studies — both the sociocultural and ecological aspects — the more I’ve discovered that it’s too simplistic to say that some practices are more “advanced” or “scientific” than others. Some of the practices that were once hailed as cutting edge, like widespread pesticide and herbicide use, have since proven to be more harmful than helpful.

Recently, I’ve read a new round of studies claiming have tried to prove that organic agriculture doesn’t make much scientific or nutritional sense. But I remain unconvinced because it seems that so much of what we would call pseudoscience is just science that hasn’t been understood or incorporated into our paradigms yet. So I’ve been really excited to read a few articles about how science is coming to accept ideas about food and human bodies that were long ago proposed by the amorphous field of alternative medicine. One, from the New York Times, is about how gluten-sensitivity that isn’t related to Celiac disease, once decried as impossible, is gaining endorsement from doctors. Some doctors and researchers think it might even be proof of leaky gut syndrome, a condition common toly accepted by alternative medicine but often dismissed by medical doctors as quackery.

Another piece, a fascinating longread from the New Yorker, talks about how researchers are completely revising previous knowledge about the role of bacteria in the human gut. Originally, doctors aimed to eradicate bacteria from our intestines before discovering that even the worst of bacteria — for instance, the one that causes stomach ulcers — might have a productive reason to be there in the first place (in this case, doctors think it might help us understand the recent increase in the incidence of asthma). I highly recommend both of these articles to anyone looking for a reason why problem-solving depends on those looking to further the scientific consensus and those willing to work outside of it. They speak to the importance of cultivating both a scientific and a skeptical mind.

Memories of a Summer Spent in Food: Praiano, Italy

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 11:00:32 -0500

Kyra Morris ‘14 reflects on the way that food shaped her summer farming in a coastal Italian town:

If you were to go to Casa L Orto you would fly to Naples, take a train from Naples to Meta, and then take a bus from Meta to Praiano. The bus winds along the coast road that skirts the edge of the cliffs and by the time you arrived in Praiano your stomach would be wound into knots. As you climbed out of the bus and into the sun, you would have in front of you what my friends and I call “the Vettica hill”—a hill that just keeps going up. It starts out steep and then it climbs to a point before dropping down sharply into the other part of town. The Vettica hill will take you past the grocery store Tutto per Tutti, past Pasquale’s barber shop, and up a steep ramp to the gates of Casa L Orto. You stop, out of breath. Through the ironwork of the gates you can see only the domed white roof of the villa and the surface of the water sitting still as fabric below the cliffs.

I spent this past summer farming at Casa L Orto, a villa in Praiano, Italy. Praiano is a tiny town an hour south of Naples “in the heart of the Amalfi Coast.” Casa L Orto belongs to Carol Lewitt, the widow of the famous American contemporary artist Sol Lewitt. The property includes nine terraces available for farming, all of which had been abandoned for period of ten to twenty years before Carol began a project to restore them. The process is still very much in its initial stages, but she hopes to turn the property into a eco-tourism destination with an outdoor kitchen and outdoor cooking classes.

During my summer there, the farm at Casa L Orto was a farm without an outlet. The farm had three interns and a farm manager to maintain it, but without a partita IVA we could not sell any of our produce or even set up a farm stand. Instead we simply gave food away. In the mornings we would go down to the terraces and weed or stake tomatoes until the sun became so hot we felt our bodies baking. After a break for lunch we would walk into town (up and over the Vettica hill) and distribute vegetables. Sometimes we would bake or cook with our produce before distributing it, but other times we would simply carry a bag full of cherry tomatoes on each arm and a bag of eggplant in our backpacks. Sometimes it was difficult to find a home for our produce because though Praiano no longer has an agricultural economy, almost every family has a small garden. But where we did find a home for our vegetables, we always received something in exchange.

One of our first afternoons in Praiano we made zucchini bread. I had never thought about the oddity of this American dish until we were met with skeptical looks when we declared to Pasquale the barber that we had made him “panne di zucchini.” The following evening Pasquale called to us from the opposite side of the fence that separates Casa L Orto from his shop and passed a plate of cookies over to us.

This was only the beginning of our food exchange. In exchange for tomatoes and peppers we got gelato-making lessons from the guys at the gelato store, in exchange for eggplants we got free drinks from Luigi who owns one of the hotels in town, from Salvatore at the restaurant Bare Mare we got donuts and cappuccino. One morning we woke up to find that one of the construction workers who worked alongside us had left us a box of fifty plums from his plum tree. I hesitate even to call it a food exchange, because there was no calculation involved in this exchange of goods, only an ingrained tradition of generosity.

With all the vegetables that we did keep for ourselves we cooked everything from the simple pasta dishes to elaborate risottos. Toward the end of the summer, every night turned into a dinner party. Our friends would begin to arrive around ten thirty and then cooking process usually began around eleven. When we were too tired to cook, we would walk down the hundreds of steps that led down to the beach—La Praia.

We always ate at Bare Mare, run by our friend Salvatore and his mother Clelia. The experience of eating at Bare Mare is difficult to compare to any restaurant experience I have had in the US. The restaurant consists of about fifteen tables arranged on a cement patio overlooking the rocky beach. The restaurant has no theme or idea, just has really good food, and especially good seafood. If we wanted to order from the menu, we had to ask for one. Otherwise Salvatore would start bringing us dishes.

The dishes at Bare Mare are not fancy and they have probably been approximately the same since the restaurant opened. Each dish is designed to showcase a specific seafood and that’s about it. Your fish doesn’t come with vegetables on the side or any complex garnishes. Yet I hesitate to call the food at Bare Mare “simple food” in the way that Alice Waters might use the term because it is not consciously simple. It is prepared with care and with an eye to taste and tradition.

I lived closer to food this summer than I ever have this summer, not only because only a few sets of stairs separated garden and kitchen, but because food embraced me on all sides. Food was the thread that tied together our friendships with Pasquale, Salvatore, and others. It was also the first topic of conversation. Whenever we ran into a friend the first question, “how are you doing?” was quickly followed by “what did you eat today?”—“che cosa hai mangiato oggi?” Sometimes when I am walking across cross campus, I wish a friend would stop me and ask: “what did you eat today?”

Nace Cohen ‘14 writes about the politics of and issues surrounding food labeling: I would...

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 14:49:35 -0500

Nace Cohen ‘14 writes about the politics of and issues surrounding food labeling:

I would consider myself well-educated when it comes to food terminology. I know the difference between organic and all natural, between cage-free and free-range, and between pasture-raised and pasture-finished; but that doesn’t mean I know what I’m getting when I go to the store, and it doesn’t mean that I know what the most environmentally friendly/sustainable/humane/responsible purchase is. This is not as simple of a problem as it may seem, and no, it is not due to lack of education on my part.

There are two major problems with our system of food labeling. First off, there are too many different labels, some with meaning, and some created with the intent of confusing consumers – what does artisan mean when it refers to Tostitos? Second, there is too great of a variation between different products under the same label – does organic just mean spraying with an organically approved pest control, or does it say a lot more about the environmental impact of that crop’s production? These are very different problems, and they require very different solutions.

The fact that companies are allowed to make vapid environmental/ sustainable/humane claims about their products is absurd to me. Shouldn’t our government have a monopoly on these types of buzzwords so that consumers are not constantly left wondering whether “all natural” is a term that carries any meaning? The fact that corporations are allowed to intentionally mislead consumers about this information is unnecessary and appalling.

The second problem, however, that there is a high degree of variation within a label category, seems much larger and more intractable. The fact is, farms are diverse and are so by necessity. Trying to capture all of that diversity with a few labels is impractical if not impossible. Calling the spinach from a five-acre farm in New England organic and the spinach from a 10,000-acre farm in California organic misses something important about the nature of these products. The organic label sets a baseline standard, and because it is a label that products either do or do not qualify for, there is no incentive to exceed that baseline. Rather, because it is cheaper to clear the bar as minimally as possible, those farms that barely pass it will outcompete those that exceed the standards, and production of organic food will tend to the lowest common denominator. Ultimately it is we the consumers, not to mention the health of our planet, that suffer.

Farmers’ markets have seen this disparity and tried to do something about it. By having the opportunity to meet the people growing the food, consumers have direct access to more complete and accurate information about what they are getting. However, it is difficult to envision the continued growth of a market which has such high costs associated both with buying and selling food. I don’t mean the price, but the time cost both of producers and consumers put in is tremendous, particularly on the side of the producers who have to commit people to the direct marketing of products. However, this is the best, and only, solution that there is right now. That should change.

I was a little worried about writing this post because I don’t have the solution to the problem we are facing. I don’t think that the solution is better labeling. While that may help, it will inevitably fall into the same trap of regression to the minimal standard. I think that the root of the problem is the disconnect that exists between consumers and their food. In the past consumers knew, and trusted the people that grew their food. Then when people moved to cities they knew and trusted the people that sold their food. Now consumers are being told to trust the labels on their food, but should they? I don’t think so.

Brendan Bashin-Sullivan ‘15 writes about his recent trip to Tokyo and the way we conceive of...

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 11:00:33 -0500

Brendan Bashin-Sullivan ‘15 writes about his recent trip to Tokyo and the way we conceive of efficiency in the food system:

If fish were self-aware, and had developed a notion of retributive justice, and could conceive of an afterlife, they might cast the Tsukiji Central Fish Market in Tokyo as fish hell. Approaching the market you see the small fry in the various outbuildings, those who have been gutted for a particular organ or chopped to pieces, or marinated, or hung out to dry. These are the outer circles, and you sense that the fish have gotten off easy because of their size. It is when you reach the final circle, through roofed, shabby, blood-slick wet concrete paths that weave between brightly lit stalls, that you see the tuna. They are maybe not fish anymore exactly. They are frozen solid. Their pectoral fins have been cut off, leaving a pair of huge handholds on their sides. Capable, bored-looking old men with cigarettes hanging from their mouths run the fish through bandsaws, cutting the frozen meat, nose to tail, into wedges and planks, which stay rigid. Some still have skin, fins, and spines attached.

Full disclosure: fish hell, to me, was awesome. It was the most fun I had in Japan. I got blood on my boots. I ate ramen standing on the street with the capable bored-looking old men with cigarettes hanging from their mouths. I ate perfect cubes of fatty tuna. I got out of “lost in translation” angst-core mode and got a little goofy. This all happened at about 6 AM on a blisteringly cold late-December day in the largest fish market in the world, while tens of millions of dollars’ worth of fish were changing hands on the auction floor not a hundred yards away. Eerie calm and contained chaos and everyone trying to pretend that they weren’t having a great time because they were up against realness. Especially me.

And I guess that’s what I grapple about now. I would take a job there if you offered me. I would get strong and competent, good at driving tiny carts around tight corners, good at flensing and hacking tuna-bodies into manageable pieces. I would develop sixth and seventh senses, and never fall down on the job, or get cut on the bandsaw, and I would throw and catch the necessities of the job effortlessly. Tsujiki seems to allow states of grace to coalesce around, in and through it. It has the sublime rhythmic efficacy of an organ, a heart pumping fish through a vast network into every tiny corner of Tokyo. And for that reason I found it intensely beautiful.

But in another sense Tsukiji is emblematic of a deeply problematic relationship with the ocean. I read a phenomenal book this winter, Paul Greenberg’s “Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food”, which complicated the excitement I felt for Tsujiki. It’s not as simple as “oh, killing fish is cruel, this is a murder-market, I will abstain.” I don’t think that. I think that any place so foundational to the life of a city is above that kind of reductive thinking. In providing a solution to the problem “distribute 2000 tons of fish to 13 million people”, Tsukiji has outpaced moral indictment by several orders of magnitude. My problem is one of trophic levels and efficiencies. I’d like to dig into them with reference to the frozen, finless tuna.

In Four Fish, Paul Greenberg engages in a sustained investigation of the way we extract nourishment from the ocean. The subtitle of the book is telling: The Future of the Last Wild Food. Greenberg astutely points out that we have never really progressed past a hunter-gatherer relationship with sea life. We are able to catch more fish in less time now, but we have yet to meaningfully domesticate, or even steward the sea life on which we most depend: tuna, salmon, cod, or bass.

Tuna are especially problematic in this regard. Tuna are apex predators who expend enormous energy to make catches. This is responsible for their fatty red flesh. But the same feature that makes them delicious also makes them a highly inefficient source of protein: Greenberg’s going estimate is that a tuna must eat 50 pounds of smaller fish in order to gain a pound themselves. In a sense, the frozen tuna blocks at Tsujiki are frozen chunks of lion meat: the culmination of a food chain. It is telling that the French phrase for seafood is fruits-du-mer: the fruits of the sea. We have historically underestimated the trophic level of seafood, because the processes that generate it are obscure to us. But we cannot continue to hunt and gather sea-protein as we have: it becomes clearer with every diminishing catch that our needs demand an extractive relationship with the ocean that is no longer sustainable.

Tsukiji’s impressiveness, then, stems not from its correctness but its efficiency. And the discord between how well Tsukiji does its work and how bad that work really is gets at a problem I’ve been trying to mull for a while now: why is industrial food able to monopolize the quality of efficiency? Conventional industrial food production points to an illusion of efficiency: it claims that it is able to get the most food to the most people with the least waste. A common thread of opposition to re-localized or de-industrialized food production revolves around a perceived loss of efficiency, and attendant food shortage.

But Tsujiki, properly understood, teaches us a more important lesson: the efficiency of industrial food is not absolute efficiency. It is an efficient fulfillment of a desire built on habit and preference that does not inherently account for the future. Tsukiji shows us that the processing, sale, and distribution of fish can be centralized and optimized in exciting and authentic ways, ways that speak to Japan’s history and culture as well as the lives and livelihoods of those who work the market. But that efficiency is more reason to ensure that the fish entering the market are harvested in an attentive rather than extractive relationship with the ocean.

We need to reinvest the efficiencies of distribution into maintaining efficient production: rebuilding aquatic ecosystems, pioneering oceanic farming and ranching techniques, protecting baseline genetic diversity, distributing our impact among species that can endure it, and aiming for greater trophic efficiency than the tuna’s abysmal 50-to-1.

We cannot see or predict the ocean nearly as readily as the land. This has meant that we pay less attention to it, that we consider ourselves subject to, not responsible for, the mysteries of the deep. Our impact, however, has long outstripped this mindset, and we have acquired industrial strength on the ocean without the corresponding advance in care or attention. There is a competence and a grace to be found here as a species. The sublime power and mystery of the sea is a reason to approach it with reverence and humility, not to excuse ourselves from our responsibility to act cooperatively with it.

emilyrfarr: Yale Farm vs. Nemo Some pictures from intern Emily...

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 17:28:55 -0500

collapsed high tunnel

snow meets metal poles: snow wins.

emilyrfarr:

Yale Farm vs. Nemo

Some pictures from intern Emily Farr of the impact Nemo’s 34” snowfall had on the Yale Farm last weekend. We were thrilled to weather Irene and Sandy with minimal damage, but didn’t get quite so lucky this time, as one of our hoophouses’ metal frames collapsed under the weight of the snow. We’re in the process of digging out and moving on, and so glad to have two more hoophouses to grow winter greens in for the rest of the season!

Sadie Weinberger ‘13 reminds us that the Farm Bill isn’t the only piece of legislation...

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 17:23:38 -0500

Sadie Weinberger ‘13 reminds us that the Farm Bill isn’t the only piece of legislation that affects farms and farmers in this country:

About a week ago, the satirical “news source” The Onion published an article headlined “Congressional High Priest Concocts Farm Subsidy Bill In Legislative Cauldron.” Despite its utter absurdity, I often feel that the Onion writers are pretty much the only ones who really know what’s going on these days. You don’t have to read the article to get the joke: the process of creating the Farm Bill has been, and always is, so complex and inaccessible to the public that it may as well be some dark ritual conducted by men in black robes in the dead of night. And, in fact, I read one more jab into the quip, which is that even the members of Congress do not completely understand what they’re doing when they “concoct” the bill.

This might seem like old news; after all, the Farm Bill is renewed every four years, and that should have meant a clean adoption of a new bill—or, rather, a revised bill—by the end of the 2012 session. That was me making a little joke, since we all know Congress doesn’t work like that. The fact is, Congress is even now introducing new bills that would affect the provisions of the Farm Bill, and we ought to be keeping them in sight. The end of 2012 didn’t mean the end of farm-related legislation, despite the cessation of talks and workshops revolving around Farm Bill activism.

In fact, just in the last week, Congress has introduced two such bills: the Farm Program Integrity Act and the Protect Our Prairies Act. The former, a bipartisan bill introduced on February 12, aims to close the loopholes in farm program payments that allow non-working or absentee farmers to receive subsidy payments. The bill allows for payments to working farmers and one additional non-working manager per farm. In fact, the House Agriculture Committee considered this proposal last year as well, but did not adopt it. Many sustainable agriculture organizations, including the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, are strongly in support of this bill, especially as we consider the new Farm Bill.

The Protect Our Prairies Act is part of a conservation effort folded into the Farm Bill that basically pays farmers not to farm certain areas of land in order to prevent erosion and development of valuable landscapes. This bill, also bipartisan, is a bit different in that it is actually designed to save taxpayers and the government money by prohibiting federal commodity payments on newly broken native sod and reducing federal subsidies by 50% on that land. Loss of grassland in prairie areas has led to erosion, fewer opportunities for small ranchers, and damage to local ecosystems and economies.

We should keep in mind that even though the New York Times stopped publishing articles about it, the fight over the 2012 Farm Bill is not over yet. Agricultural legislation is being introduced and passed all the time. Let’s all keep an eye out and keep ourselves informed.

Farm intern Justine Appel ‘15 gives a personal account of the Lazarus Summer...

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 13:40:00 -0500

Farm intern Justine Appel ‘15 gives a personal account of the Lazarus Summer Internship:

It’s impossible to pick which day of the Lazarus Summer Internship was my favorite, but here are some contenders: The day we pressed 1,300 soil blocks (imagine eleven large wooden flats loaded with brownie-like cubes of soil) and filled them with lettuce seeds so tiny they looked like coffee grounds. The day I hung hundreds of feet of twine from the top of a hoop house so that our climbing beans could grow upwards into a beautiful curtain of vines and leaves. Maybe the day we sliced up 25 basketball-sized cabbages, soaked them in brine, and packed them into big white buckets to ferment into incredible sauerkraut (if you think sauerkraut is gross, you clearly haven’t tried making your own). Perhaps the day we visited the gorgeous Thimble Islands, and when the tide was too high to continue clamming, went trolling through the water at such a high speed that we would go flying whenever we hit a wave and couldn’t contain our screams and laughter. Definitely the evening of our visit to the Yale-Meyers forest, eating blueberry crisp out on the porch and sharing stories as the sun went down.

The Lazarus Summer Internship is the Yale Sustainable Food Project’s summer-long program in which six Yale College students manage the Yale Farm. This includes preparing beds, seeding, irrigating, and harvesting crops, and finally selling them at the CitySeed farmer’s market at Wooster Square every Saturday. But what the internship offers beyond that is what makes it extraordinary. The interns get to go on weekly field trips to organic farms around Connecticut, and take weekly classes on topics such as the economics of small farms, food lexicon, and soil science. The educational dimension of the internship showed us how the principles and techniques of organic farming could apply to farms much bigger than our beloved acre, and farms that were more animal-based (including a sustainable oyster farm!) than ours. We picked the brains of brand new farmers, struggling farmers, farmers who managed large heated greenhouses, and farmers that had experienced significant losses due to pests and diseases.

At the end of the summer, we went to the Northeast Organic Farming Association summer conference: three days of classes and workshops taught on everything agricultural, from worm composting to efficient irrigation to increasing food access in impoverished urban settings. Between the beginning of June and the end of August, all six of us had gained not only an understanding of how to grow and care for a diverse array of crops, but also tremendous insight into the world of sustainable food and the many paths we could take to get more involved. The YSFP staff taught us not only how to make perfect pesto and how to properly grow leeks, but how to think critically about the big picture issues inherent in our food system.

The internship, like the Yale Farm itself, demands real effort from your mind and your body. Most days, I would come home and collapse on the couch with a book and a big spoonful of peanut butter, lacking the energy to even hop in the shower and wash all the soil out of my hair. But, also like the Farm, the rewards far exceeded the amount of work we put in. Fresh vegetables to take home every week, the opportunity to pick up several new skills and experiences every day, and the lasting bonds we formed with each other and with the incredible staff far surpassed the value of our monthly stipend.

I cannot recommend this opportunity more strongly. All of this past summer’s interns had different areas of interest, and different reasons for wanting to work on a farm all summer. If you love to learn, and more importantly, if you love to eat, you should spend the summer on the Yale Farm and see what crazy adventures it brings.