The point of this blog is to document my experiences over the coming year. I want anyone to be able to appreciate the stories and thoughts that I write here, so I plan to cut down on directionless writing. If you read my earlier post, that was a good example of what I hope to avoid and I'm glad to say it is gone forever. My predecessor, last year's Walker fellow Ben Molini, said it well in his first blog post "The heart of the matter is that if one is going to write on a public forum, one should be saying something informative or worthwhile."
So let me inform you that my happy responsibility over the coming year is to independently explore different motivations and strategies for non-industrial agriculture. I am particularly looking for food-producing communities that deliberately continue in traditional diets in the face of modern food. The first leg of my journey starts tomorrow May 31 when I'll fly back to Arkansas, where I just graduated from college. I got a summer job working on a tiny farm in the tiny town of Vilonia. The farm had its start about five years ago when Tara and Robert took over the patch of land and Tara started cultivating the land while Robert continued with his job in waterway restoration. Tara has been the driving force behind the farm and Robert picks up the slack (because work is never done on a farm) but now Tara is pregnant and needs a hand. So I'll be learning the ropes until August when the baby is born and I get to basically run the whole show.
After the summer I'll really embark, I'll go to Italy and start learning Italian, go to the Salone di Gusto and Terra Madre international Slow Food conventions and from there my future becomes too hazy to predict. The fallback plan is to stay in Italy for as long as my grant money holds out, but other equally possible ideas include traveling south through Africa, heading north to Germany and eastern Europe, going to Irish herding communities to try to learn some Gaelic... I have options. But I will be following food and the people who make it. Essential to my project is to live and work and eat with the people who are passionate about their art of eating and coaxing food from the land.
I have been home for about two weeks since graduating, and my birthday was yesterday! I'm 23. To celebrate, my parents got a watermelon instead of a cake, which was perfect. Also I'm thrilled with the end result of a project very long in the making. I just baked the bread made from only grains that grew in the Hendrix community garden (Hendrix is my college). I planted the seeds, watched the barley grow, harvested it, threshed and winnowed the grain, ground it (in a blender because my friend is holding my crank grinder until next year), and finally just today the result was cream of barley for breakfast and something you could call bread later on. Barley has gluten, but not as much as wheat I guess so it didn't really rise, but the crunchy parts are super dank for real. My intention for that grain was to make beer out of it, but that project will have to wait until I have my own farm.
I'm pretty happy about the outlook for this next phase of life coming up, I know my situation is enviable and I have enormous gratitude for all the support from friends, family, and school folks. I'm also humbled that someone thinks it's a good idea to let 23 year old kids go around the world and seek whatever they think is the coolest. Have have to admit that I'm one of those young people who wants to save the world. This next year I'll start really figuring out how I think I can go about that task, and this blog is how I'll be sharing my experiences with everyone who'd like to know about them.
