Reflecting on food with all its intersections and impacts, with the various ways in which it can be made relevant within almost any discourse and to illustrate almost any end, makes beginning this (rambling into the deep crevices of cyber space) with my day of volunteering with Foodshares' Bendale-BTI Market Garden a pretty jackpot way to start. http://www.foodshare.net/bendale-bti-market-garden.
As part of the service-learning component for the Philosophy of Food: Food Justice and Education Thought class at OISE, with Dr. Bradley Rowe, I ended up on a bus, train, light rail, and bus again, to 1555 Midland Ave in Scarborough. This meant leaving my nest on the north-west edges of central Toronto at 8:00am. This, meant waking up much earlier than I find enjoyable, after a feverish night with swollen tonsils, to arrive at the school after an hour and twenty minutes of extensive and humiliating head-bobbing, eye fluttering and the odd, undignified drool.
The first thing that greeted me before the entrance was an expanse of beautiful (to me, they were large) sets of garden beds. I had arrived, excited to dip my hands, that so rarely touched soil, into that green space under the sun, to begin learning a practical element of what we have spent a couple of months theorizing.
one half of the front-of-school beds
(I don't know how to grow anything that sustains me; I can't recognize a plant unless its obvious 'bits' are showing (bits?buds?), and as for a seed, the situation only gets worse. What does this mean, why is this the case?
Why do the words for peasant and farmer in my root language of Arabic have a derogatory associaton to them? DO they have a derogatory association? Or is it that their very meaning has become that of those jobs, those things, that only the 'poor, unfortunate' do? After all, when they say 'hands like a farmer', it means coarse, calloused, hard, worker's hands (and this is bad?) Blue Collar? Rural? Somehow 'from another time'?
What do all these complicated associations, societal assignments that permeate many minds in softer or harsher ways, what do these mean? what do these mean in the school garden? What complicated tension ensues?) . Something to consider: http://www.ecoliteracy.org/essays/school-garden-debate-weep-or-reap
Just as a pause, let's start with this:
Bendale Business and Technical Institute, an 'alternative' school in Scarborough. What are the first things that come to mind with this designation?
http://schoolweb.tdsb.on.ca/bendale/Home.aspx
'Alternative' school is often (not-always) associated with a 'non-academic' stream, those kids who won't be going to university, basically. They learn the trades, the hands-on things; this makes landscape horticulture and hence, a school garden ideal. They will work with their hands, they will learn how to keep us nourished and fed. This is particularly fraught with the complications and cultural borderlands of being in a densely immigrant community--Scarborough--not often discussed as an ideal place to live (however untrue, it is often discussed as a 'suburban ghetto'), a place with a bit too much violence for Canadian liking, a bit too many dark bodies and white bodies darkened by income brackets that fall too low, a bit too many 'non-academic' stream kids. Before putting these stereotypes aside, it is good to consider them, and to consider how they mark the bodies of those in the school I was about to step into. How strange is this hierarchy of 'intelligences', this prioritizing of knowledges and hence bodies, this ability for our system to somehow show us that which is done with the hands, with the body, is secondary, and that which is done with the mind is primary. Or that these two things are separate, or that there is a defined way for these to be expressed. Anyway.
Like I mentioned, I arrived and was met by Katie from FoodShare; she was harvesting cut-greens for the Market the next day and to supply to their restaurant customers at 12 dollars a pound. They also sell to George Brown College to their culinary program. She told me that most of the students were prepping for exams so I wouldn't be seeing too many of them out there today. She told me how the garden coordinated with the teachers/school in a number of different ways. For one, with the culinary and horticulture classes. The garden was previously funded, but now they sell the green to hopefully be able to hire a farm manager and cover Katie's work there (she is currently funded by FoodShare). Also, the ministry covers the hiring of students to tend the gardens full time for 7 weeks in the summer.
One half of the ten beds on the 'right' side of the garden were seeded in May, the other half in June, so they always had beds ready to harvest in alternating months through the summer. I learned that microgreens are the first set of true leaves. Also that the first leaves that come out are not the true leaves. There were a number of names for these true and not-true leaves that I forget, as well as other leaves, and weeds (one I do remember specifically was called a 'binder'...it literally wrapped around a plant till it was 'bound'). There was lettuce, spinach, radish, peas, green onions, green beans, and tomatoes. I'm sure I've forgotten a few. The beds at the back of the school had beets and tomatoes as well--huge long rows near the football field.
back of school beds
After the brief tour I was handed what looked to me like a mini-machete--it felt pretty bad-ass--with which I proceeded to quite quickly cut my pinky finger and run off to the school office for a bandaid. Not long through harvesting the lettuce, an intern with FoodShare who is in the Public Health Masters program at UofT arrived to help; I found out she was specialized in nutrition and would be teaching some cooking workshops to the students in the summer using, in part, some of the things from the garden.
Kitchen
About an hour before 'lunch break', four students joined to work on the spinach and the radishes. At least 3 of them were really enthusiastic, and one was already set up to be one of the students hired by the ministry to work the gardens through the summer. Check out the great guy in this youtube vid!:FoodShare featured on CBC May 26th, 2013 (Includes clip of the Bendale garden and one of the students I met!)
At around noon everyone headed in for lunch. We (non-student harvesters) ate in the staff room. One of the staff made an awkard complaint about the price of the cut greens--apparently they can be found from other suppliers at a dollar less. Discussions on how farmers do not make money and the way in which the food system is broken ensued. I am unsure as to whether the message got through; it made me think again about how many facets of the food system have to be articulated and explained to create a full picture.
After lunch we returned to the beds out front and harvested some more spinach, and then took everything back to the kitchen to get soaked/rinsed, put in a spinner to remove the water, and then stored for packing. The radishes had to be organized into groups of similar sizes and then put in bunches of 15-20 with rubber bands.
I was so amazed by how enthusiastic and hardworking and tirelessly kind and connective Katie was with her students and her work. She explained to me about Foodshare and its work in schools, and the mobile food trucks they also provide, and explained that on their priority list culturally appropriate, healthy and nutritious foods were at the top, followed by local and then organic. She also explained the complicated nature of this prioritizing, and the way in which it has needed to work. I was also made to see how receptive kids are, even in high school, and despite my minimal contact with the students at the school and the handful that were actually available on that particular day, the way in which the garden was so obviously a positive and therapeutic space ('obvious' to me, at least) was clear.
Despite my lack of personal experience in the garden, there was a nostalgia to it as well; my father, grandfather and particularly my uncle had and have a strong connection to the earth, to the garden, to the ground and I have memories of many trips to see the ripe figs and massive tomatoes and pungent smelling plums and apricots. Thinking of that, and thinking of the many other things already mentioned, as well as being so firmly in the body and doing the work and looking at the leaves and touching/feeling the differences while sorting; feeling the warm sun and the rhythm and flow of it; suddenly my overnight illness felt like it was fading away.
However I am ashamed to say my back hurt, and I was pretty tired after not too much work. I also realized the time and effort that goes into selecting, preparing, washing and packing just those little bags of greens I buy for my salad. And how the small farmer has to put in a lot of care and dedication that can be avoided by big agri-business. I really also sat with how our technocrat world and definitions of progress within capitalism have made this work low on the list of aspirations. That is something else for me to think about and reflect on in more depth. I for one, felt a deep gratitude and love for these programs that remind us of how farming connected us to the world, to our food, to our hands, in a very specific way. How much agency comes in that connection, and how much meditation too. It felt to me to be heroic; however, after just a half day of working a tiny urban school garden, it is highly likely that I am romanticising the whole thing a little bit. Nonetheless.
I also was able to experience how much can be learned from working a small patch of land--about the soil, about the seed, about the planting and the growing and the seasons---business, biology, cooking, teamwork, community and creativity. And history. And stories, the many stories and storytellings that build and merge around the people involved in this one space, and the spaces this space represents. These stories alone make it ripe with possibility. In short, I got my fingers in the soil, and this first step feels like it was the beginning of something very precious--a very long, very interesting, process of learning about the world, and probably myself somewhere in the midst of it.
http://www.ecoliteracy.org/change/school-gardens
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