I have a dream. 22 February 2007 6:34 pm
Posted by Tracy in : agriculture,cooking,CSA,eating,environment,school,sustainability,tea,work , trackbackOkay, many dreams. But a lot of them overlap in a vision I had driving home from the Small Farms Conference, a vision that was more like a monologue of me talking to myself about how cool it would be to cook for an urban farm or community garden, one with a farm stand or CSA program to lure people into sampling my food and asking for the recipe and buying the ingredients fresh there to take home and share with their families and friends. Maybe once a month (or more) we could have family-style dinners so members of our little farm/garden community could meet each other and hang out and cook or not, depending on whether we turned the dinner into a cooking class as well. We could make our kitchen available to groups who wanted to cook together — I’m all about cooking as a communal activity (the one-butt kitchen is the enemy) so I hope providing a venue and awesome facilities encourages more people to play with food if it isn’t always a lonely thing. And of course the farm/garden would supply ingredients for the punk rock teahouse of my dreams, because while I’m going there I want a pony. A punk rock My Little Pony, whose icon is a kitty drinking tea.
I’m even coming up with slogans for this project: eat here now, I’m just in it for the cooking, thank you for cooking. Summary mission statement: growing towards a world where everyone knows and loves their food. Secret goal: to have more fun than everybody who doesn’t get with the program. Also, total commitment to greater awesomeness for all. I should come up with something explicitly about deliciousness as well. But meanwhile, I have a cat partying all over my office calling attention to the fact that I should find the floor under all my stacks of paper. Also I should go to bed early and continue taking good care of myself because reliable sources report that my immune system may be negotiating with early spring-type bugs to force me to rest if I don’t get with the program already.
But dang if that that Tufts program all about my buzzwords (urban and environmental planning/agriculture, food and environment) doesn’t keep getting me all excited over and over again. Which reminds me — I found my class for next term: Urban Farm (more here. So awesome. I think it’d make an excellent follow-up to my sustainable agriculture class, which went into full-on food politics mode this week (and it wasn’t exactly apolitical before). Sort of like how urban farming/community gardening might be a good way to recover from working for the Union of Concerned Scientists or Center for Science in the Public Interest or something…. Hell yeah, I can dream.
