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Joanna got me a new-used spade shovel because the one we were using is flat shovel. This came in handy tonight. I am so lucky! |
We haven't done much garden work this week. The weather dipped down to near-freezing last week and we've been busy. Jona had some fly problems because of the compost I mixed into some pots. As the sun set this evening, we turned the compost bucket, double dug the remaining bed in the backyard, and seeded bloomington spinach, mustard spinach, and parsley.
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| Joanna's abandoned worm bin makes a nice outdoor mini compost bin. The brick on top somehow deters beasts from breaking in. |
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| Three weeks ago, this was a pile of smelly, anaerobically digesting food scraps. After Erica intervened by turning and adding lots of compost, it finally begins to look something like soil. Though it still smells. Jona is working on it! |
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Our cute backyard garden so far. Not much going on! |
Here are some my answers for the application:
Who or what are the most importance influences in your life? Why? We invite you to include positive and negative influences on your life, struggles that you have overcome, your hopes and inspirations.
In the spring of 2008, when I was a sophomore at Grinnell College, thirty-two of my classmates received homophobic hate mail with phrases such as “God hates fags, we hate fags.” For the first time in my life, I feared walking outside alone at night. For the first time in my life, I began to understand my actions and identities as political, not exclusively personal. I realized that someone could assault me, physically and mentally, simply because of my sexuality.
My college community joined together to respond to the hate crimes. We cried, hugged, held rallies and forums, wrote love mail, made art, and chalked the campus in affirming messages. To help me pro-actively process the events, I produced a half-hour documentary archiving students, faculty and administrators’ responses. Organizations on campus continue to screen my film for new generations of students. However, the college failed to institutionally challenge homophobia (and other oppressions). After more than four years of student pressure, as well as continued threats and assaults directed at the queer community, the administration finally instituted a hate crimes response policy.
The hate crimes of 2008 made me fear for my personal safety, but they also made me feel invincible as part of a fierce community of queers and allies. I gained a deeper capacity for sympathizing with other oppressed groups and learned the importance of creating institutional change in challenging oppressions.
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| Erica double digging the second bed in the backyard. |
Describe your community (the places you grew up and/or where you currently live). What does it look like and what do you love about it? What do you want to change about it? How is your community impacted by the current food system?
This is a hard question for me because I belong to many communities: born and raised in Kansas City, MO, attended college in Grinnell, IA, and currently reside in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood. I’d like to address the queer community, though it’s not necessarily geographically defined. Things I love: our struggles for the right to love, feminist bookstores, flannel, our campy puns, artsy posters, and radical potential. I truly believe that the queer community has a critique to offer the world and I know we’ll make unimaginable progress in my lifetime. However, I also know the profound disappointment that inevitably follows profound hope. As an incredibly diverse community, we also have a lot of internal issues: racism, classism, transphobia, sizeism, ageism, violence, and yes, even sexism.
The queer community is also a part of all communities, so we experience all aspects of the food movement, from Whole Foods to food deserts. We are snobby queers who feed only organics to our children, and we are teenagers who pop into Quick Trip for our daily Cola-flavored slushy. Most of my friends see the food justice movement as well-intentioned, but boring and bland. I want them to see themselves as having a stake in the movement. One of our major challenges is learning to organize ourselves across identities and food traditions so that we respect all choices and cultures but still organize for food justice.
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| Baby beets growing in spite of the cold! |
What motivates you to work towards social justice? Why is it important to you to change our food system?
I recently saw a theater production about violence within the LGBTQ community. One of the characters received hate mail that threatened violence. They looked towards the audience and asked, “But it’ll never happen to me, right?” Every part of me wanted to shout, “No! You are a brilliant, fierce, young genderqueer person who makes the sky shine, who makes me excited for the future of this world! Everyone can see that!” I was ashamed that my realistic answer is more like, “Hopefully not.” I want to create the world in which I don’t have to prepare my community for violence, invisibility, and tokenization. I want to create the world in which we are all celebrated. The momentum from this experience extends beyond LGBTQ organizing and into other anti-oppression work. I am responsible for dismantling all systems of oppression/privilege, including ones I benefit from.
The queer community struggles with the industrial food system around health and embodiment. The food system tells us what we should eat, what “normal” bodies look like, and what/who we should desire. Simultaneously, we work within the system to eliminate “normal” bodies/sex, build bodies that empower us, and build/recover food traditions.
Food is inherently an act of celebration. It is literally and metaphorically the stuff that becomes our minds and hearts. It is a tool for creating power. Food needs to be a major part of our revolution so we can take our bodies back from industrial agriculture and the systematic oppression of our families.
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| More Erica double digging. |
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