TracyFood

Eating is an agricultural act… 16 January 2007 9:07 pm

Posted by Tracy in : WFFC, Warren Belasco, agriculture, books, environment, school, sustainability , trackback

…or so Wendell Berry would have us believe. I’ve never actually read any Wendell Berry, but that’s about to change. Today I signed up for Sustainable Agriculture, an environmental studies class at the University of Oregon. The texts include Food’s Frontier: The Next Green Revolution by Richard Manning (2000), The Essential Agrarian Reader: The Future of Culture, Community, and the Land (edited by Norman Wirzba, 2003), Eat Here: Reclaiming Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket by Brian Halweil (2004; this one I tried to read last year but had to return to the library unfinished), and selections from the out of print Meeting the Expectations of the Land: Essays in Sustainable Agriculture and Stewardship, edited by Wes Jackson, Wendell Berry, and Bruce Coleman (1984). We’re required to prepare a 5-page review on a book of our choosing related to the subject, and I’m thinking Warren Belasco’s Meals to Come: a history of the future of food, which I finished last week, just might fit the bill. Alternatively, I picked up the fantastically-titled Raising Less Corn, More Hell by George Pyle along with the Manning and Wirzba books from my friendly local public library today (and I put the Halweil on hold again).

Class meets Monday and Wednesday, 10-11:50 AM, and I’m looking forward to it quite a bit. I’m also looking forward to Thursday morning, when I have an appointment to meet Lynne Fessenden of the Willamette Farm and Food Coalition — last week I sent them a letter of interest about an internship that’s already been filled, but it sounds like they might still be able to put me to work, so hurray! Here’s hoping for good work to help me pay for my class and books that I don’t have to return to the library!