The Seed & the Sprout

The Seed:

My interest in food and hunger issues has grown over the years from a mere interest to a lifestyle. Food has not always played a central role in my life; to the contrary, I was the pickiest child imaginable while growing up. I refused to eat half of the meals my parent’s made and so ended up eating lucky charms for dinner more often than I would like to admit. I didn’t even eat vegetables until I entered college and that was because the lady in the salad line forced them upon me! It is amazing to look back over the past two years and see how my relationship to food has changed so drastically and how that relationship has transformed me personally. People often laugh when they find out that I am a vegetarian who didn’t eat vegetables up until three years ago, and that my first mushroom wasn’t until a year and a half ago!

So I decided to start a blog. While I can only hope my family and friends read it once and a while, the main purpose is for me to have a place to think and talk about food, share my successes and failures in the kitchen, and to try and piece together my many thoughts on food, agriculture, the environment, hunger, and sustainability. The product will hopefully be something semi-coherent and something that will continue to grow and change as I grow and change.

Hungry Sprout will be a site where I talk about everything related to food. I will talk about adventures from the oven, recipes I’ve found, ice cream I have churned, bread I’ve baked, vegetables I’ve grown, and my attempts to try and give back to the community around me when I can. I realize this sounds very ad-hoc. There are cooking blogs, baking blogs, and social progress blogs. To me, cooking, sustainable agriculture, and fighting hunger must go hand-in-hand. If we are to build a sustainable food system, it must be rooted in an agricultural system that is healthy for the earth, our bodies, our communities, and the world around us.

I am no expert on any of these issues. My experience in the kitchen and on the farm is limited and far from professional. But food is my life and I love sharing with my friends and family. I hope these little posts will add a new dimension to my relationship with food and friends. If people do end up reading for some reason, please please please post and share experiences, recipes, etc! I promise to try them out!


WARNING: THIS FIRST POST IS TERRIBLY LONG, BUT I FELT I MUST WRITE EVERYTHING. ALL OTHER POSTS FROM HERE ON IN WILL BE SHORT AND TO THE POINT…I HOPE.

My interest in food and hunger issues began in the winter of 2006/Spring of 2007. That December I traveled in India for two weeks with a study tour from school. That was my first experience with poverty on such a large scale and I was unsure how to deal with it in any healthy and productive way. Every morning my group would walk out of our hotel and women begging for money and food would surround us. They could not speak English, but their body language was impossible to misinterpret. These women would take their right hand to their mouth as if to eat food, but they clearly hadn’t eaten in days. Most of these women had small children in their arms that were visibly malnourished, every one of their bones protruding through their skin. One friend on the trip told me of how one of these women tried selling her child to him in exchange for money to purchase food. A tour guide explained how many of the beggars actually drugged their children to make them look even more ill in hopes that it would help them to get more money from tourists. I had no way of processing this reality and found myself trying to shut it out of my mind and turning a cold shoulder.

It is not that I didn’t care (I was brought to tears numerous times a day), but I felt paralyzed. I didn’t know how I could possibly help these people who were so desperate to survive that they were willing to sell their child. Our group leaders explained how we shouldn’t give them money since that would just cause more and more people to follow us around and that giving money or food might perpetuate their poverty, that giving money to an organization when we returned home would better help the community in the long run. This thought helped some, but I still could not get over the terrible feeling I felt every time I saw someone starving to death because they couldn’t afford the plethora of fruit and vegetables that were being sold right down the street in a market.

I returned from India with only two weeks before I left to study abroad through the Semester at Sea program. I had no time to process anything I saw and tried to shove it in the back of my mind. Semester at Sea took me around the world in 100 days, eleven ports in nine different countries. For a detailed account of my semester and my trip in India, you can go to the travel blog I kept, which is linked to on the right of the page under “Food for Thought,” entitled the Tyranny of Distance.

While on the ship, I took the most influential class of my life, entitled “Food & Society,” with Professor Simon Nicholson from American University. The class went over many aspects of food, from the history of agriculture, industrial agriculture, sustainable agriculture, the future of food, and world hunger issues. It was this class that helped me to realize the power of food. It is over these few months that the connection between my passions, the environment & human rights became evident. I realized how food is one of the strongest relationships humans have with the environment, their body, their family, their community, and every living human being.

My experiences in port seeing hunger in a world of plenty in every single country strengthened my interest in food and hunger issues. From favelas in Brazil, townships in South Africa, a Dalit village in India, and on the streets of Beijing, everywhere I went I saw hunger and I could not escape it. And then I would step back onto my cruise ship and sit down to an all-you-can-eat buffet dinner where waiters brought drinks and dessert. The dissonance I felt was overwhelming and ever-present…


The Sprout:

When I returned back to the States I knew that I was changed beyond belief. For the first time, I knew what I wanted to do with my life, what I had to do with my life. I wanted to dedicate myself to helping to build a sustainable agricultural system and helping to provide those less fortunate with healthy, delicious food.

For the next eight months, I worked part-time on an organic farm while at school. I learned more practical knowledge during my time on the farm than my four years at college. I focused the rest of my non-academic energy on the environmental club at school, helping to bring food issues into our work. I spent the entire year writing my senior thesis entitled “America’s Failing Food Aid System & the Need for Reform.” (If you would like to read it, I would be more than happy to send it along, although I must warn you that it is long…longer than this first blog post).

I am currently living in DC and working for Food & Water Watch on their food team. The main project I am working on is related to labeling laws for rBGH, an artifical growth hormone in milk that has unknown and potentially dangerous effects on humans. I just received a volunteer position through Operation Frontline, a joint project of the Capital Area Food Bank and Share Our Strength. I will be a volunteer chef at a local farmer’s market (Ward 8 Farmers Market in SE), teaching people in the neighborhood how to use local, fresh produce in a cheap and delicious manner. That starts next weekend and I will be sure to update about that when it happens. I am nervous but incredibly excited, since it seems like the perfect opportunity for me, bringing together all of my passions and interests in a really fun way.

Starting in September, I will be a Fellow with the Congressional Hunger Center for a year. For six months, starting in September, I will be living in Tucson, Arizona working with the Community Food Bank. Then I will return to Washington, DC for six months to work on hunger policy through a governmental or non-governmental organization.

On top of all of that, I find time to cook constantly. I make ice cream every week and try making bread every week or so (I just made my first sourdough starter…more on that to come). I talk about food non-stop to my friends (thankfully most of them are just as obsessed over food as I am!)

So that is who I am and why I am here. That is why I am always talking about and working with food and what motivates me to get up every morning. If anyone read this far down, I applaud you. I will name an ice cream flavor after you or something in return! I feel as if I am always on a journey, learning new things about food, trying new flavors, and continually fighting industrial agriculture. I hope the Hungry Sprout will help me to make sense of this journey and will be something I can look back on for years to come.If people do read, I urge to always share your foodie thoughts, recipes, pictures, and experiences! Thank you and enjoy!