A connection...

Since i’ve been in Canada, a lot of people have asked me why I’ve come wwoofing. It’s a fairly valid question to ask someone when they’ve chosen to spend a year of their life doing something. The strange thing is that for the first 3 months, I didn’t really have a good answer. I muttered something about learning about growing vegetables and living a more self sufficient lifestyle, but it just didn’t quite seem right..

Then a few weeks ago, someone asked me the question, and I answered that I wanted to have a better connection with the food I eat. And I realised that I'd finally hit the nail on the head. I mean, it's only taken me 4 1/2 months to work out why I'm here...

Last year I did a project where I looked at my life and consumerism, and spent a significant amount of time looking at what food I ate, and where I bought it from. It started me thinking about animal welfare, what vegetables I bought, and where I shopped. By the end of the year, I’d stopped shopping in supermarkets, started getting a weekly organic veg box from a local farm and become much more strict with myself about where I sourced meat from. I also went wwoofing for the first time, my first foray into a greater involvement with the food system.

Over the 4 ½ months that I've been here, my whole perspective on food has completely shifted. I understand so much more about how things are grown, raised or produced. I’ve seen things through from planting to weeding to thinning to pruning to harvesting to preserving to eating. When I eat a tomato I think about mixing soil, planting seeds in pots, tilling the ground, transplating seedlings, staking, pruning and tying the plants, and remember the hundreds of multicoloured and weird shaped tomatoes that I’ve harvested, canned and frozen. When I eat chicken, I think about gathering eggs, watching the chicks hatch, carrying heavy buckets of feed, watching them peck around in the pasture, moving pens, catching them for butchering, killing my first chicken, gutting them and then making broth from bones. When I eat butter, I think about putting together the milking equipment, calling in the cows from the field, milking the cows on my own for the first time, assembling the separator, separating out the cream, setting up the churner, waiting patiently, the magic moment of opening the churner and seeing butter inside then washing and salting the butter...

Food has become more than just something I eat - it's become something I experience. I appreciate it and understand everything so much more. I can feel the time and work that's behind each item, and the stages involved to get it to my plate. Seasonality has become more instinctive, and I'm more enthusiastic to learn about eating all the less prime parts of the animal. Eating a meal from food that's come almost entirely from food grown and raised within a mile of your kitchen is an incredible experience - all the hard work seems worth it all of a sudden. It's definitely changed my perception of value too - for example, the meat at my current farm isn't cheap, and significantly more expensive than "organic" food from the supermarket, but the difference in the quality of life (and death) that the animal has is immeasurable. In addition, the farm are also preserving and improving the quality of the land, not something that can be said for the industrial farming system. 

But as well as making me connected with the food I want to eat, it's also helped me to disconnect from the food I don't want to eat. I was already moving consciously away from processed food, but I feel like I’m now running away. Being on a farm in the middle of nowhere is a good time to detox from packaged food and educate myself a bit more about the impact on my body. I no longer want a loaf of bread that'll stay fresh for a week, because proper bread shouldn't still be soft after a week. It freaks me out to see piles of identical vegetables, as even a short time growing vegetables has taught me that they come in all shapes and sizes (and I like the wonky carrots and funny shaped tomatoes). And seeing animals raised well - pigs snuffling through woodland, cows roaming across massive areas of grassland, chickens pecking through fresh pasture - has convinced me that I don't want to eat meat that isn't raised like this. 

It's challenging the way I think about the whole food system - about chemicals, about waste, about welfare. It's opened my eyes and educated me in a way that I can't learn from a book or a TED talk. Having said that, I highly recommend "The Omnivore's Dilemma" by Michael Pollen if you want to find out more about the food you eat.

I feel like I've got so much more to learn, but this is a journey I'm very happy to be on...