![]() She plucked it from its low hanging vine, wiping the dirt on her drenched overalls. ![]() In one of my first weeks on the farm, my friend Carly made me eat a tomato. And Whole Foods certainly would be kinder to my shoes than the muddy fields of the campus farm. a thumb of death), I had finally found a way to turn gardening into vegetables.īut what, you may ask, was the appeal? Yes, the food was free, but why not just go to a grocery store with all its glamorous and vibrantly colored choices? As opposed to the imported, preserved goods of a supermarket, the vegetables at the farm are at the mercy of the weather, the seasons, and the skill of its attendees, so you only get to choose your pick from the narrow selection of in-season produce. Despite the fact that I have the polar opposite of a green thumb (i.e. Yep, everything that is grown at the campus farm is available for free to its volunteers. I might have been less inclined to believe her abstract notions of interconnectedness had I not started volunteering at the University of Michigan campus farm the previous semester.Ī ten-minute car ride away from campus, the farm was my two-hour Friday afternoon escape from the leering pressures of essays and OWLs for a blissful few months (until I ran out of free time entirely), a place where I could meet new people, learn some stuff about plants, and take home free food. Picking your beets from a shelf is a lot different than from the hands of the person who grew them. It reestablishes that connection that is often lost in the endless produce isles of a supermarket. Visiting farmers market or eating at restaurants that have chosen to source locally allows you to be a part of something a little bigger than just you and your plate. She argued that in a world where the space between the meal on your table and the earth or animal that it came from is relentlessly widening, it’s easy to feel disconnected from your surroundings, other people, and your community. She told me that eating local food – having a conversation with the person who grew the carrots you’ve been eyeing at the farmers market, and maybe just plucked them from the ground that morning – is nourishment for the body as well as the soul. This, I think, is the biggest evolution I’ve noticed in my own writing since I first learned to contain myself in the five-paragraph essay structure my highschool teachers were so fond of.Ī couple of months ago, I interviewed the owner of the vegan restaurant “The Lunchroom”, which sources its ingredients locally, for an environmental journalism class. In this way, I appear to be making some sort of progress, whether my compulsively type-delete-typing fingers will acknowledge it or not. I’m learning how to think like a writer, rather than digging the good writing out of my clustered paragraphs. I’m learning how to think ahead, structuring my arguments beforehand so that they come out that much closer to what I was envisioning in the flurry of thoughts flustering my brain. ![]() However, an important changing aspect of my writing process is the quality of the content that my speed-writing produces. This is how I’ve always written, and I think it is entirely logical to infer that this is how it will always be. ![]() ![]() I edit as I go, revising one sentence – or at the very most one paragraph – at a time. I sit back, take a look at what I’ve written, fix the typos and cliches, read it out in my head, and move on. ![]()
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