On September 21, 2014, I joined a sustainable agriculture contingent at The People’s Climate March in New York City, which laid claim to the largest climate march in history with over 400,000 people marching. All told, the climate march had 2,646 solidarity events in 162 countries. Media coverage was generous, which amplified the message: “To Change Everything, We Need Everyone.” And the word got out to the world. Climate change awareness is on the rise.
Julia Cosgrove thought she would become a research scientist after college. But her career plans changed after joining the UVM Farmer Training Program.
During Sarah Fidler’s semester abroad in Paris during her junior year, she wrote a dissertation on pastries and macarons. She was fascinated by the anthropological side of cooking and baking, the history of why certain foods are made in different places, and how family tradition dictates the use of specific ingredients. Studying the role of petit fours on the French table was very different from what she was learning in her dietetics classes in the UVM Department of Nutrition and Food Sciences. Little did she know that her studies in France had planted a seed for her career.
Five years later, Sarah is Research and Development Specialist at Lake Champlain Chocolates in Burlington, VT. Before you have time to wonder if this means she gets to sample her creations, the answer is yes: “I eat a lot of chocolate at work.”
By Amy Trubek
For over a decade, I have been involved in conversations with folks about our contemporary food system. When our food talk turns to changing how our food system operates, we often end up talking about which is more important, the push (growing and processing food) or the pull (purchasing and consuming food). A ‘push-pull’ dynamic makes good sense when thinking about food as a market commodity, items to be sold and bought in grocery stores, farmers’ markets, and other retail outlets. Lately, though, the notion of “voting with your fork” comes under criticism. Such change relies on tweaking individual choices (buy your pickles at the farmers market not at WalMart) rather than addressing what drives us to be primarily passive consumers in the first place.
Imagine if you had the ability to choose any of the issues under the agricultural sustainability umbrella and could then run computer-generated outcomes according to variables of your own choosing. This kind of modelling is being done with weather, urban growth, traffic, just about everything. Let’s take a look at a more human kind of modelling—the art of fiction. What can fiction tell us about sustainable food systems? Deciding to find out, I chose three novels (set in the past, the present, and the future) as imagined by perceptive, articulate, and compassionate story tellers. Continue reading
