Advertisement
Published: February 7th 2010
Feb 5 2010
Friday 1:30 pm
Ramblings of an Agriculture and Food Security Extensionist
Yes, that is my official title.
We are firmly into Nicaragua’s “summer”… or hot and dry period. The sun burns my pale skin and leaches color out of laundry hanging out to dry. At our community spigot there is always water in the morning, though at spigots further out or up the hill, the water doesn’t come every day. Water is a touchy subject in Moropoto.
In other community news, I am tired of waiting for the family that I selected for my first improved oven example. I got everything together and wanted to build it before Christmas, and they just keep putting it off. I am going to talk to two other households who make and sell food to see if they are interested in an improved barrel oven.
The “danger” of projects in poor nations is that when people get wind of a project, they all want whatever it is, even if they will never use it or take care of it. In the cases of these improved ovens, I want to limit them to people who already sell things, and therefore A) have proven work initiative; B) are making some kind of income and can afford $15 USD of bricks; and most importantly C) they will appreciate the project, recognize it as a means to an end, and take care of the oven, not letting it fall into disrepair.
To some extent, this happened with my Seed Bank last year. Some women just wanted free seeds for the sake of free seeds, and they didn’t take care of the garden or see any results. The grand majority planted and got results, thus it was a success.
This year, though, in April, I am going to write letters and personally invite about 10 women to participate in this year’s Seed Bank. These women have gardens that they take care of and they have a history of letting a few products go to seed so they have seeds to plant the next season. I am also going to require that they attend two educational sessions before they get seeds. One will be on nutrition and Marango, and the other will be a mapping project. Both will be described in later detail in April.
In other news, I am almost finished reading Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, a fascinating book. Here, for your information, is the blurb from the back of the book:
Today, buffeted by one food after another, America is suffering from what can only be described as a national eating disorder. Will it be fast food tonight, or something organic? Or perhaps something we grew ourselves? The question of what to have for dinner has confronted us since man discovered fire. But as Michael Pollan explains in this revolutionary book, how we answer it now, at the dawn of the 21st century, may determine our survival as a species. Packed with profound surprises, The Omnivore’s Dilemma is changing the way Americans think about the politics, perils, and pleasures of eating.
This blurb is about on track. The book ranges from corn farmers in Iowa to grass farmers in Virginia, to buying his own cow and then finding it on the feedlot farm in Kansas, where it will go on to become steak in a supermarket, to the ideology of Big Organic to hunting mushrooms and wild pigs in California. As a journalist he works to find all angles, and as a skilled story teller, you actually understand the point of view of all sides, even if you don’t agree.
On another note, I am having a real problem describing this book to my Nicaraguan family. It’s hard because while vegetarianism, organic, fencerow to fencerow agriculture, and slaughterhouses are a part of our American lives, these things mean nothing to Nicaraguans. Yes, they understand organic, in the sense of coffee. But the idea that people would pay $5.09 a pound for “organic” tomatoes is beyond their realm of imagination. Here corn is ground to make tortillas every morning and, combined with kidney beans, provides a complete form of protein. In our household we eat well. There are corn tortillas and beans, but also fresh cream and fresh cheese and a full range of condiments and vegetables, and we have meat at least two or three times a week.
I don’t know where I’m going with this, but basically I cannot share this book with anyone here. My Nicaraguan family just has no basis for comparison to our “national eating disorder” in the States.
One of the book’s arguments, of course, is that the States is a society of immigrants and has no national food traditions, and thus we are susceptible to every “study” or new “diet”. Nicaragua has their tortillas and beans and is the definition of the Slow Food movement in motion.
So from improved ovens to seed banks to The Omnivore’s Dilemma, food is on my mind.
Also, if you’ve made it this far, I might as well move onto another couple of life philosophies that are becoming pretty settled in my late 20’s.
Wal-Mart & Target and Big Box Companies: Woe to the company selling their products to them or to the people working in them, but to the consumer, they do offer the lowest prices. I am not ashamed to buy products at these stores.
However. I am becoming ashamed that it’s effing hard to find products that are Proudly Made in the USA. Outsourcing sucks. And the Big Box companies are the ones responsible for this by demanding lower and lower prices from the companies supplying them, and conditioning us on cheap products.
This also goes for conditioning us on cheap food. After growing up on a small farm and now being a Peace Corps Volunteer my ideas on how food should be produced, sold and eaten are becoming more settled.
Basically, my theories are becoming more and more conservative. Things should be kept local. That goes for buying products made in the USA as often as possible, even if they cost more. And food should be kept as local and fresh as possible, even if it costs more.
Now for work. My parents raised me to believe that anything is possible and that the world is my oyster. Thus, I have been studying and working and living around the world. And the further I go, the more I realize how much I appreciate my upbringing in rural Missouri and the values my parents have instilled in me as a hard working middle class American.
These values, though, clash with the pride Bryn Mawr College instilled in me, and the arrogance. This college educated pride and arrogance tells me that returning to rural Missouri, living on my parent’s land where I was raised, and finding work at the Lake… that it is below me. That I could do better. That I should do better.
So on one hand, I was raised to take pride in hard work, sacrifice, and being an American. I was also raised to believe I could be and do anything I wanted.
Then at college, the end lesson was that I was an elite Seven Sisters alum who was destined for great things and a very high salary and I shouldn’t accept anything less than this equation of success.
I think this is the crux of the issues of several of my generation. We came from lower to middle class back grounds, we worked hard, and were accepted into elite colleges, and thus held the hopes of “bettering” our lives. Now, nearly ten years after leaving home and five years after graduating from college, many of us are still caught in this web of expectations. Our minds war back and forth between where we came from and where we should be going. Some of us have gone to graduate school and now have even more expectations and debt telling us not to settle for less than the “perfect” job and upper class salary.
And out of all of this mess, I am finally coming to some conclusions. First, I am proud of my family and where I came from. Second, I am happy that I didn’t follow the Bryn Mawr mold and go to graduate school, but instead have taken the last five years to explore the world. And lastly, I am a creative woman who makes things happen, and am a generally happy and productive person.
The end lesson is that the values instilled in me by my upbringing have won out over the arrogance of an elite college education. I value hard work and taking pride in being an American. And after being a direct participant in globalization, I believe in keeping things local, from the shirt on my back made in the USA to the steak on my plate that was farm raised in Missouri.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.205s; Tpl: 0.01s; cc: 10; qc: 64; dbt: 0.1017s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
wendy brownell
non-member comment
bien dicho!