Aldis Gamble ’13
Meditations about Food
Early morning mist still clung to the ground as I walked past the rows of crops, my footsteps trailing out behind me through the dewy grass. Rows of corn stalks stood tall, their bright green leaves hiding the new ears of corn just starting to form. Farther on, a row of lettuce shoots painted a swath of neon green across the rich brown earth. Darker in hue, but no less colorful, sprang up the chard stalks, red, white and yellow. The crops continued as I walked, row upon row of ripening vegetables. I felt I knew each personally, having spent hours planting the seeds from which they had grown in the soil, plucking weeds from between their stalks, and lastly harvesting them to eat or sell.
I came to the end of the garden and turned my steps towards the barns where the cows awaited milking. It was a morning like countless others I had woken up to during the past two summers I spent working on a farm in rural Vermont. In that time I grew to love farm work in all its various forms, from the beauty of baby calves to the stench and sweat of shoveling manure. I also learned from those I worked with about where most of the food Americans eat comes from, and the differences between the industrial methods used to create it and the organic practices I was a part of. The more I learned about the sources of food, the more I cared about social, health, and environmental issues surrounding it.
When I heard we would be watching “Food Inc.” and talking about food issues in Human Ecology, I immediately became excited. Here was something I knew I already cared about. I had wanted to see “Food Inc.” since I had first heard it come out, but had yet to find the time. Watching “Food Inc.” I was amazed by many of the practices that have become common in the industrial food industry. In response to the growing ecoli outbreaks, plants have started packing beef in ammonia to kill the ecoli, even when feeding cows grass for five days will make them shed eighty percent of the ecoli buildup from their corn diet. Seeing and hearing this information amazed and sometimes appalled me, but more than anything, I felt grateful for the push happening here at The Island School for more local foods. However, I had to wonder, where was that local food coming from? At home in New England I had a fairly good idea of what many local farms are like from my own experiences in Vermont, but what was farming like here in such a different environment?
As I walked along the island, I saw the long, spiky leaves of pineapple up ahead, heralding our arrival at the field. As I waited for the rest of our group to catch up, I noticed how hard and rocky the ground under my feet was; so different from the soft, most dirt back in Vermont. However, when our teacher began talking, he explained that this rocky soil was the best for farming as the rocks absorbed the sun’s heat. This stopped all the water from evaporating. Whatever nutrients the soil lacked, he would make up for with fertilizer. As he saw it, whether or not to use fertilizer and pesticide was not a choice, they were necessary in order to grow crops. This was an opinion that I had never seen before. In all of the agriculture I had been exposed to, fertilizers and pesticides were viewed as a means by which to minimize the amount of work farmers had to do and help the crops grow larger, but not as elements without which crops would not grow. For as long as I could remember, I had been taught the superiority of organic food, yet now I began to question my own beliefs. The fertilizers used by our instructor were manufactured in the United States, most likely, in environmentally unfriendly ways, and then shipped into the Bahamas. However, if the alternative was importing all food, did these environmental costs become worthwhile? Then again, was it really true that crops could not be grown without fertilizers and pesticides? I knew that one visit to one farm could not provide the answers to these questions, but I wanted to know more. These were the questions that I feel must be taken into consideration, and answered if we as The Island School truly try to make our eating habits more sustainable.