Blog 3

Lindsey Crawford

Library 201

19 April 2010

Blog Post 3

Last summer I worked as a part time volunteer for the Sierraville Organic Farm. Once a week, for a period of two months, I donated my time and labor and in return I got a basket filled with fresh organic produce from the Sierraville farm, along with fresh foods from other farms that participated in a weekly local farmers’ market. The Sierraville Farm specializes in greens, romaine, red leaf lettuce, green leaf lettuce, European mix lettuce and spinach. It also grows radishes and carrots. As a volunteer, my job was to harvest and package the produce. Because the farm is all organic, this labor is back breaking, with everything being done by hand and without the help of any herbicides or pesticides. Despite being tired and sore by the end of each day on the farm, this experience was rewarding, giving me a deeper connection to the food I eat and a respect for the agricultural process.

Obtaining food in the U.S is easy. If I am hungry, say for some lettuce, all I have to do is walk down to the co-op and buy a bag and then go home and eat it. However, before the days of supermarkets, drive-throughs and food processing plants, getting a salad was anything but simple. Working on the farm made this clear for me. I realized just how much I took for granted the convenience and availability of food. While I liked working on the farm, I would not want to devote my life to that kind of work day in and day out. It is so time consuming and physically exhausting. With that said, I definitely enjoyed the food I helped, grow, pick and bag myself. It made me feel accomplished.

I have never hunted; however, I think if I did I would feel the same way about the meat from hunting as I did about the produce from farming: connected. The meat that I eat now comes in a package. It doesn’t resemble the animal it came from at all. When I eat meat, I take for granted all the work that went it to getting it onto my table, along with the life that was sacrificed for my meal. I think if I had to hunt my own meat I would probably eat less of it because of a deeper respect for the animal and the work that went into preparing it. I also think it would be hard for me to kill animals on a regular basis because I love them; I have two cats.

Francis, Charles. Organic Farming: The Ecological System. Madison, WI : American Society of Agronomy : Crop Science Society of America : Soil Science Society of America, 2009.

Guthman, Julie. Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.