The letters “I” and “P” have never been so daunting as when they began showing up in my inbox this summer. It meant that my time as a free spirited, free-of-responsibility, youthful student would be coming to an end, but only after a year long senior project, which began causing me increasing agony as a searched for that one brilliant idea. Every morning I questioned what I should do this year for my project, and every night I went to bed without answers. Stress increased, and creativity dwindled.
“Go to sleep, it will come to you there”.
“Go do something completely unrelated to the project, maybe inspiration will strike you there”.
“Come up with a new idea every day and then look back and develop one”.
All sorts of advice, and still a void.
Leading up to this summer, I had found myself passionately interested in food and agriculture. It began in Joe Trumpey’s class my second year of college, and has only picked up in intensity, since. I have taken further classes about environmental impact of our dietary choices, and have spent a significant amount of my free time reading about food, learning about organic gardening and permaculture, trying to understand the FDA- USDA-Monsanto relations, talking about different diets, and teaching myself how to cook. I loved studying the webs from the production of food to the consumption, and looking into how, where, why, what, and when we eat compared to people of other regions and of other times.
I read all sorts of material including: In Defense of Food, The End of Food, Supersize me, Food Revolution, The China Study, Hunger, Silent Spring, Omnivore’s Dilemma, Catching Fire, etc. I watched movies such as The Future of Food, The real dirt on Farmer John, Food Inc, and the GMO Trilogy. I attended meetings and volunteered with local organizations, and spent my Saturday mornings at the Farmer’s markets, buying up produce for later meals I would prepare vegan. I visited the Michigan State student organic farm, volunteered with Growing Hope, went to workshops on beekeeping and permaculture, and learned all I could about sustainable agriculture.
It was this underlying interest of mine that fuels many of my projects. While traveling in India last semester, however, I was introduced to different kind of lunch. A lunch which was not packed of left overs and cold cuts in the rushed morning before running out the door to catch the bus. Nor was this lunch made up of tater tots and greasy, cheesy pizzas, hamburgers, and pop. It was a hot lunch delivered to the school from a person’s home. A home cooked meal biked to the school or the workplace around lunchtime in a pail known in India as a “tiffin”.
I soon found out that in Mumbai, they have this system down to an art. Here, through the streets of the largest slum in all of Asia, 200,000 lunches are picked up from the homes of workers around the city, and delivered to them at work by a fleet of 5000 delivery men. This system is unbelievably efficient, for only 6 in every one million lunches goes astray. I was intrigued by the design of the pales themselves, the act of eating a hot, home made meal delivered at the lunch hour, and the feelings surrounding this tradition and the experience of lunch itself.
Upon returning to the country this summer, I spent a month in the Upper Penninsula at Dancing Crane Farm. Here I lived and worked, learning about organic farming by becoming an organic farmer. Walking out to the fields each morning, barefoot, empty laundry basket in hand, warning the weeds of their treacherous future, I learned about food by growing it.
The combination of these two experiences formed the ideas which would become my IP project.
Read Full Post »
alyssa.IP 