Part 1: WWOOFing. "Man, we are such clichés!" proclaimed an e-mail I received from my friend Stella, who was a member of TeamParis and ¡TeamSevilla! She was referencing this New York Times article about "a new wave of liberal arts students who are heading to farms as interns this summer." She and I are both contemplating spending a few extra weeks in Europe after we leave Cambridge under a program called WWOOF (Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms), which enables volunteers to work on organic farms in exchange for free room and board. I currently have WWOOFing plans in the works for Scotland and France in July. I'm motivated less by disdain for industrial agriculture than by the opportunity to stay in Europe longer on a small budget, to practice my language skills and experience these countries outside of tourist hubs, and to live out my longstanding Tolstoy-influenced farmer fantasy. "If WWOOFing in America has 'as much bohemian cachet as backpacking through Europe,'" Stella observed, quoting the article, "then we must be getting cachet up the wazoo for doing it in Europe!"
That article alone would have been enough to make me feel like a cliché, but it came right on the heels of further evidence that farming is all the rage among the bohemian liberal arts crowd. Last week I had a phone date with my former executive director from Alaska. She had recently visited her alma mater, a liberal arts college in the Midwest, to deliver a talk to students in her capacity as a distinguished alum. I don't remember if she told me this in response to my plans or if she volunteered this information, but apparently tons of the students she met are planning on putting down their books and taking up their hoes this summer too. And this is at a college where, I am told, odors from a nearby turkey farm waft through campus with some regularity--not the ideal environment to inspire would-be farmers, I'd think.
Interestingly, both my former boss and the Times article point to a common culprit for this surge of agricultural enthusiasm among the youngsters: Michael Pollan. He wrote The Omnivore's Dilemma, which certainly ranks among my favorite books in recent memory. Pollan's philosophy on food includes eating more plants; avoiding processed stuff (or as he calls it, "edible foodlike substances") to the maximum extent possible; eating locally and seasonally as possible; and eating animals that lived in something approximating a natural environment, as opposed to a factory where they live in cages while being force-fed government-subsized corn. (It's not just what you eat that matters, Pollan says, but what "what you eat" ate.) Pollan's gift for storytelling and ability to weave together politics, ecology, and personal morality make him the kind of author who inspires disciples and not just readers. So maybe I am a cliché, but hopefully I am also part of a groundswell in a generation that will demand that we develop a more environmentally sane system with which to feed ourselves.
Part 2: Stuff White People Like. It has probably not escaped your notice that I am white, in the demographic sense of the term. But apparently I am really, really white in the cultural sense of the term, as described by that great arbiter of what constitutes urban, upper-middle-class white culture: stuffwhitepeoplelike.com.
You already know I am thinking of joining those corporate ag-hating liberal arts students on their unpaid stints on organic farms, but consider also that I am studying abroad for my graduate school education in a country with free health care and lots of opportunities for traveling. Prior to coming here, I worked as an advocate for low-income people at a non-profit organization in Alaska. In my free time I hung out with my gay friends, ordered movies from Netflix, watched the Daily Show and the Colbert Report, hosted dinner parties, tried learning Spanish, and spent time outdoors with my gear from REI and LL Bean. Also while in Alaska, I dated a half-Asian woman with a gifted, multilingual child; we watched Juno and attended an ugly sweater party together, and had a difficult breakup. Oh, and did I mention my love for coffee, local beers, wine, hummus and sushi?
If this has offended you, I apologize--but that would suggest that maybe you're a "white person" too.
Showing posts with label navel-gazing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label navel-gazing. Show all posts
28 May 2009
22 February 2009
wraps, cambridge, and the scale of my competence
Not that long ago I received an e-mail from a nice young lad from the Williams College class of 2011. To fully convey the horror of getting an e-mail from an '11, I told my Cambridge friends who graduated from Williams in '08 to imagine receiving an e-mail from somebody from the class of 2015. This young, young sprout e-mailed me on the advice of the Williams chaplain, who remains one of my favorite people on Earth. My ego hadn't been this tickled since, a year or two after graduation, I was informed that I still had a "following" at Williams after I left.
This sharp, fresh-faced child is now in charge of WRAPS (Williams Recovery of All Perishable Surplus), the campus food salvage program that I ran for most of my time at Williams. WRAPS was the first domino in a series that led to my job in Alaska. This distant successor of mine, who was almost certainly born after Ronald Reagan left office, is hoping to expand WRAPS in some interesting new directions and wanted advice and some background on the history of the program.
As I offered my recollections of the founding and expansion of WRAPS to this charming lad, who had yet to be conceived when I began my schooling, it led me to reflect on how different my identity is at Cambridge than it has been anywhere else. I realized that the core of my "extracurricular" life has always been community service and activism, from Williams right on through to Alaska. Somebody reading my resume might be puzzled to discover that in late 2008 I suddenly decided to stop trying to feed the hungry, save Darfur, and teach English to immigrants, and instead got into planning dinner parties and serving as treasurer for an overprivileged posse of grad students. There's a possibility that I might be getting involved with the British version of food banking, but that's the only hint of my old pastimes and may not pan out anyway.
I have a few theories on why this is. Theory #1, the Happenstance Theory, is that there is no real underlying reason at all: I just got sucked into doing what I'm doing early this year and thus there's no time for anything else. I certainly never would have set out to be an MCR social secretary, but I was a "keen" participant in early events and was recruited by the outgoing committee, and that was that.
Theory #2 is the Poverty Lobe Exhaustion Theory. Since I spend all of my studying/class time thinking about poverty, underdevelopment, etc., all the room in my brain for that stuff is taken up and therefore I need to do something different with my personal life. There could be something to this, but it's inconsistent with my last two years in Alaska, so I don't find it convincing.
Theory #3, the most sophisticated explanation and probably the one that makes me look best, is the Wendell Berry Theory. My grad school admissions essays and fellowship applications of yore often referenced Wendell Berry, the author-farmer-environmentalist who wrote that "our understandable wish to save the planet must somehow be reduced to the scale of our competence." In other words, if you're going to try to help, you better know what the fuck you're doing.
When I encountered Berry's thinking in an environmental studies course at Williams, it immediately resonated with me; Berry helped me understand why I instinctively shied away from the kind of activism preferred by many of my peers in favor of locally grounded projects like WRAPS. Even my Save Darfur activism had a specific local goal: divesting Alaska's Permanent Fund from firms that are bankrolling genocide. My most successful projects in Alaska had laser-focused objectives, such as helping community organizations and tribes access federal dollars for summer feeding. You can see why the work of Bill Easterly, the economist who thinks that grand development plans are doomed to fail, is also attractive to me.
The Wendell Berry Theory suggests that I'm not doing any community service or activism at Cambridge because I know that I don't know or understand this community enough to be of much service to it. This may not be the right attitude to project at, say, a job interview... but I think it is one of the emerging core values of my still-young -- younger than that kid from Williams! -- career.
This sharp, fresh-faced child is now in charge of WRAPS (Williams Recovery of All Perishable Surplus), the campus food salvage program that I ran for most of my time at Williams. WRAPS was the first domino in a series that led to my job in Alaska. This distant successor of mine, who was almost certainly born after Ronald Reagan left office, is hoping to expand WRAPS in some interesting new directions and wanted advice and some background on the history of the program.
As I offered my recollections of the founding and expansion of WRAPS to this charming lad, who had yet to be conceived when I began my schooling, it led me to reflect on how different my identity is at Cambridge than it has been anywhere else. I realized that the core of my "extracurricular" life has always been community service and activism, from Williams right on through to Alaska. Somebody reading my resume might be puzzled to discover that in late 2008 I suddenly decided to stop trying to feed the hungry, save Darfur, and teach English to immigrants, and instead got into planning dinner parties and serving as treasurer for an overprivileged posse of grad students. There's a possibility that I might be getting involved with the British version of food banking, but that's the only hint of my old pastimes and may not pan out anyway.
I have a few theories on why this is. Theory #1, the Happenstance Theory, is that there is no real underlying reason at all: I just got sucked into doing what I'm doing early this year and thus there's no time for anything else. I certainly never would have set out to be an MCR social secretary, but I was a "keen" participant in early events and was recruited by the outgoing committee, and that was that.
Theory #2 is the Poverty Lobe Exhaustion Theory. Since I spend all of my studying/class time thinking about poverty, underdevelopment, etc., all the room in my brain for that stuff is taken up and therefore I need to do something different with my personal life. There could be something to this, but it's inconsistent with my last two years in Alaska, so I don't find it convincing.
Theory #3, the most sophisticated explanation and probably the one that makes me look best, is the Wendell Berry Theory. My grad school admissions essays and fellowship applications of yore often referenced Wendell Berry, the author-farmer-environmentalist who wrote that "our understandable wish to save the planet must somehow be reduced to the scale of our competence." In other words, if you're going to try to help, you better know what the fuck you're doing.
When I encountered Berry's thinking in an environmental studies course at Williams, it immediately resonated with me; Berry helped me understand why I instinctively shied away from the kind of activism preferred by many of my peers in favor of locally grounded projects like WRAPS. Even my Save Darfur activism had a specific local goal: divesting Alaska's Permanent Fund from firms that are bankrolling genocide. My most successful projects in Alaska had laser-focused objectives, such as helping community organizations and tribes access federal dollars for summer feeding. You can see why the work of Bill Easterly, the economist who thinks that grand development plans are doomed to fail, is also attractive to me.
The Wendell Berry Theory suggests that I'm not doing any community service or activism at Cambridge because I know that I don't know or understand this community enough to be of much service to it. This may not be the right attitude to project at, say, a job interview... but I think it is one of the emerging core values of my still-young -- younger than that kid from Williams! -- career.
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