introducing… me!

I have been planning this blog for a while now and am very excited that I have finally got it off the ground. By way of a brief introduction, I am a Masters student studying sustainable agriculture. (Am not going to name the institution where I study because I don’t want people, for any small sliver of a second, to think that my views are the institution’s views or sth and get me or anyone else into any trouble. This is purely my own attempt to do something I believe in, on my own).

lush organic fields in central india

Having grown up in the middle-class suburbs of SA, I clearly may not seem like the most qualified person to be studying agriculture. I can’t even say why I am so passionate about it. Trust me, I have had many hours of anguished pondering over what has pushed me to study this and have a decent answer ready for the many who ask me. Could it be something as lame as “Well, I really like food, so it’s really important to me where it comes from”?!?! Geez, I hope not. Anyway, enough agonising… onto…

THE REASON FOR THE BLOG
It’s kinda late at night now and I want to sometime poetically pull all these disparate threads together and come up with the elegant reasons for starting this blog, but now is not that time. Let me just give a little teaser: it has something to do with reading “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” by Barbara Kingsolver and a recent study tour to India to visit small organic farmers for my thesis. It would be an understatement to say a lightbulb went off. There were fireworks, real Indian wedding fireworks, going off in my brain.

Kingsolver’s book is about her family’s attempt to only eat local and homegrown food for a year. Of course, they live in the comfort of first world America and own a 40 acre farm. But the book still moved me. It didn’t teach me anything I didn’t know already about why eating locally grown food is better than our current consumption patterns, but for some reason this book really made it sink in, and hit home, and move me to action. I think it was the fact that I was reading it in February while I was in India studying these farmers. AND THEY WERE SAYING THE SAME THINGS AS KINGSOLVER! It was like the twilight zone. No really, it was mindblowing to hear these peasant farmers in the middle-of-rural-India saying the same things as first-world-super-wealthy-American-Kingsolver. It made me think that I need to change the way I live. I’ve known that for a long time, of course, but now I have a roadmap.

This blog will be a record of my attempt to do just that. Me attempting to go out there and find local food. Where is the local food? Where does it come from? Who grows it? How do they grow it? I’m not a complete purist. This is going to be a gradual process. I am dragging my boyfriend along for the ride. He’s pretty easy-going and I think he kinda gets why this means so much to me. It will be interesting at the very least…