Food for 350

Spurred by the recent harvest and the impending winter, a lot of us have been thinking harder about food this month.

This week we’re turning that thinking into a special effort to collect donations to the local food shelf (at the co-op in the donation box inside the entrance), and to share the season’s bounty during a giant potluck.

The Middlebury Farmer’s Market has been an ongoing inspiration for this focus on the scrumptious and nourishing. The market has been in its true glory since late August, but it has never been so glorious as this month. For example, last Saturday at the market you could buy -- in addition to the usual squashes, jams, meat and root vegetables of autumn -- green beans, watermelon and strawberries.

Imagine that: Local strawberries in mid-October, courtesy of the hard work of Scott Green and Suzanne Young, the Singing Cedars couple.

Things have reached the point where, in a couple of years I expect to be able to go the winter farmer’s market in the Town Hall Theater and buy fresh local lettuce.

It makes sense that we think a lot about food. Everybody has a tummy and we all get hungry several times a day. What could be more natural?

But it’s that very naturalness - -and the threats to nature in the form of environmental degradation and climate change – that have now also made food into a political and social concern.

This Saturday, Oct. 24, we’ll put some of the recent rethinking about food into action around climate change and feeding the hungry, as part of the International Day of Climate Action (www.350.org).

In Addison County, throughout the U.S. and in more than 100 other nations around the planet, hundreds of thousands of people will participate in activities that will create a global awareness of the number 350 -- the most important number in the world.

Most important because 350 parts per million carbon is, over time, the maximum sustainable level of carbon in the earth’s atmosphere.

We’re now at 387, and climbing.

Ahead of the coming December negotiations in Copenhagen to come up with an
international treaty of climate change, it’s fitting that the main events in Addison County this weekend will focus on food.

In addition to the “Food for 350” drive to collect 350 donations to the local food
shelf, on the Middlebury Green at noon on Saturday, hundreds of hearty and hungry souls will gather around what they hope will be 350 potluck dishes (www.350.org/middlebury).

It’s a fine way to celebrate the increasingly important role that local food production plays in Vermont culture. What better way to honor the bounty of earth’s autumnal fecundity – and to note how climate change would imperil that bounty – than to gather and eat?

Of course the world won’t change just because we have a good meal. As the core organizers of Saturday’s actions put it:

“Make no mistake—getting back to 350 means transforming our world. It means building solar arrays instead of coal plants, it means planting trees instead of clear-cutting rainforests, it means increasing efficiency and decreasing our waste.

“Getting to 350 means developing a thousand different solutions—all of which will become much easier if we have a global treaty grounded in the latest science and built around the principles of equity and justice. To get this kind of treaty, we need a movement of people who care enough about our shared global future to get involved and make their voices heard.”

Eating well, and locally, is a sly, fun way to get people involved.

The food movement, and the clever political uses to which food is now being put in service of admirable aims, have been an eye-opener for those us who cut our political teeth on the civil rights movement and ending the Vietnam War.

We came of age in a time when effecting change meant waging a kind of war – against racism, against the tragic arrogance of America’s wars in Southeast Asia. Combating those evils, we had reasons to be angry even when our primary weapons were nonviolent organizing.

To be sure, there’s plenty to be angry about when it comes to global warming and the changes in climate that threaten the very balance of nature. For starters, there’s mindless consumption (we can look in our closets and living rooms for evidence of that), corporate greed in the coal and oil industries, and enduring cowardice on the part of our elected leaders.

Organizing around food, though, changes the conversation.

When we talk about food we’re less likely to be pointing fingers at what the other guys are doing wrong. Instead, the conversation starts with our common interest in what tastes good. And what tastes best is often what’s been grown close to home.

From the standpoint of our increasingly unstable climate, it matters where the food we eat was grown. Transporting edibles from distant markets – peaches flown on 747’s from Chile to the U.S. in January, then trucked hundreds of miles to supermarkets – consumes a lot of fossil fuel. Burning fossil fuel is a primary cause of climate change and the overheating that threatens life on earth.

All of this has a special resonance for Vermont, home of the original back-to-the-land movement. After all, that movement was first spurred by Scott and Helen Nearing and their compatriots, then by Sixties and Seventies refugees seeking a simpler life in the Green Mountains.

In this century, it was a group of Middlebury College students, inspired by Ripton writer Bill McKibben and Jon Isham, an economics professor, who created the model for Saturday’s International Day of Climate Action.

Their first big effort to get our political leaders to address climate change, back in 2006, was a week’s walk from Robert Frost’s old stomping grounds in Ripton, up to Burlington. Then it was the first national day of climate action, called Step It Up.

Now here we are on the verge of the first day of actions all over the planet.

It all started with a bunch of local dreamers. As Margaret Mead famously said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

Irreversible global warming will drastically alter where and how we can grow our food. It will displace millions of people and potentially cause widespread hunger on a global scale.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s not too late to act, and to eat.

I hope this Saturday, you’ll come become a part of that (not so small) group of thoughtful, committed citizens. Bring a small dish to the Middlebury Green (RSVP at middpotluck@gmail.com). Drop a can in the “Food for 350” bin at the co-op.

And be glad for a full belly, and a day full of hope for the planet.

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At Reunion, the Comfort of Old Friends

At reunion, the comfort of old friends

By Gregory Dennis

We Baby Boomers were born in the wake of World War II, out of our parents’ desire for abundant normalcy.

Our parents’ world had been torn apart by depression and then war. In the wake of those traumas, their kids were going to be safe from harm – riding their bicycles down the sidewalks of perpetually tranquil neighborhoods.

And when it was time for their kids to go off to college, if they were lucky enough they were going to matriculate at places like Middlebury College.

We reveled in the abundance our parents created, the opportunities for summer camp and travel and good schools. And when we began to mature and our parents’ "normal" got dumb, murderous or boring, we changed the paradigm. No one was going to tell us what couldn’t be done.

But in the subsequent decades, we have learned, the world isn’t always a kind place.

Life doesn’t work out as we’d hoped. Friendships fade. We aren’t the heroes we’d planned to be. Careers go south or stall out. Our parents and children and spouses disappoint us.

The world, we now know, can be a lonely place.

So it was oddly comforting last weekend, at my 35th Middlebury College reunion, for my classmates and I to be reminded that we’d gone to college with an especially nice bunch of people.

It seems that each subsequent reunion – and I’ve been to all seven of them since our 1974 graduation – brings forth more of my classmates’ gentler side.

We spent the first two or three reunions trying to impress each other. Then we bragged at the next few gatherings about our kids and adventures.

These days we just have a good time in the company of friends and equals. We know enough about the world’s unkindness that the company of old friends is that much sweeter.

Inevitably, having a good time at reunion means retelling tales of our ignorant youth.
Launching off the 30-meter ski jump at the Snow Bowl on jumping skis during a Winter Carnival competition, without ever having been off a jump before.

Stoned, narrow-miss encounters with Campus Security, who came to tell a classmate that the car he’d reported as stolen was in fact down by the dining hall, right where he’d parked it the night before.

Drunken dares that prompted two beer-fueled classmates to ride naked, in February, atop a car that was crossing the bridge on the way home from a booze trip to Plattsburgh.

Geez, we were stupid.

It’s amazing we ever made it to graduation.

Beyond these stories of oft-wasted youth, though, lie more interesting tales of life since we left college.

Pretty much everyone there had been successful on his or her own terms. After all, people who feel like losers don’t go to college reunions.

To explore some of what our experiences have taught us, we pulled together a panel of five classmates, under the rubric of ”It’s All About the Journey” -- unofficially titled “What a Long Strange Trip It’s Been” (launch Frisbee and cue the Jerry Garcia guitar solo).

On the panel were survivors of divorce, cancer, Wall Street, parenting, and heterosexuality.

One classmate talked about being diagnosed with prostate cancer. He described his tortuous odyssey through the medical industrial complex to get the treatment that was best for him, as doctors bid for his insurance dollars with confusing, competing claims and treatments.

Another man, attending with his boyfriend and “out” for the first time at a reunion, described how ignorant he, and all of us, were about homosexuality as students. How he’d come to learn of his own homosexuality after college, and how important the battle for true equality remains.

If someone you love comes out to you as gay, he told us, the only right answer is “I love you.” And if you can’t give that answer, take a long hard look within yourself and find out why.

A couple of parents told of watching their children struggle with cancer and mental illness. Having experienced things no parent should have to, they told us that love and connection were what had pulled them through, and what still matter most to them.

One panelist talked of his greatly satisfying conversion from investment banker to organic beef farmer. Another observed that she was good at many things but had never excelled at the one pursuit that would make her a true achiever, someone worth an article in the paper.

She volunteers in the court system as part of what she calls the “liberal arts life.” She dances, does yoga, reads, and hangs out with her children. Even when you were schooled among a bunch of Middlebury College overachievers, she reminded us, you don’t have to be a star to live a worthwhile life.

But she added that she had lived for a long time with the tension that many women our age have felt, to be both Super Mom and a worldly success. “We still don’t have the balance right,” she said.

Was there a common theme there among the panelists? Something we could sum up as “our” identity, “our” experience?

Definitely not. Among a group of privileged, almost exclusively white people, the perspectives and experiences were about as diverse as they could be.

In truth, my class and any college class – and especially any generation, Baby Boomer or other – can’t be categorized by a few words or even by the era in which we came of age. To some of us, for example, Vietnam and the first Earth Day were the defining events of the day. For others, they were just distant headlines.

I spoke to several classmates after the reunion who said they’d had long and meaningful conversations with classmates to whom they’d hardly ever spoken when we were college students. Today, they have a lot to say to each other.

Their present-day connection was born largely out of what we shared at that campus on the hill, and how those four years have shaped the 35 years since then.

We’ve all made it through the same crucible. We’ve survived and mostly thrived. We’ve shared the experiences of coming to the same college in exactly the same year, entering the work world at the same moment, raising children in the same decades, making our lives out of much of the same raw material.

It’s the bond of a common journey we share with our classmates, the kind of ties one doesn’t share even with a sibling or spouse.

And when we gather every five years to tell the same old stories and reflect again on what it’s all meant, it makes the world seem a lot less lonely.

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