Land-Based Learning: Foodways

What can happen when we learn how to learn through our and others’ connections with the land? How is food a medium for understanding relationships among land, eaters, and the eaten? This interdisciplinary, multi-quarter program will be inquiry-driven:
• For whom and why has land meant sustenance, belonging and identity more than property?
• Where and when does agriculture mean food sovereignty more than continued extractive settler colonialism?
• What can re-connecting seeds, plant breeders, growers, cooks, and eaters mean and do in the contexts of climate change, post-colonialism, and regenerative agriculture?
• What are the historical relationships and future responsibilities between knowledge of the land and educational institutions?

Using case studies and experiential learning we'll address food and intersectionalities, applied agroecological agriculture, community gardening, food sovereignty, food and land memoirs, and stewardship. Students will create their own texts to synthesize and apply their interpretations of books, chapters, articles, podcasts, websites, and films such as: Charlotte Cote’s A Drum in One Hand, a Sockeye in the Other: Stories of Indigenous Food Sovereignty from the Northwest Coast; Leah Penniman’s Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Guide to Liberation on the Land; Harold McGee’s Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World’s Smells; Jessica Hernandez’s Fresh Banana Leaves: Healing Indigenous Landscapes through Indigenous Science; Laura Dunn’s Look and See: Wendell Berry’s Kentucky; Max Liboiron’s “Plastics in the Gut;” Valerie Segrest and Elise Krohn’s Live with the Seasons, Monica White’s Freedom Farmers, GRuB’s Tend, Gather, and Grow; and Sanjay Rawal’s Gather.

Our fields of inquiry will flex in relation to student interest, skills, community partnerships, and seasonality:
• Experiential Learning: Land and Belonging: With GRuB's Tend, Gather, Grow curriculum, seminar texts, and our own experiences on Evergreen’s 1000-acres as guides, we will explore the role of land as a teacher and as the basis for social-cultural belonging.
• Farm and Community Agriculture Practicum: In collaboration with Evergreen’s Organic Farm and community agricultural sites across the region, we will gain practical knowledge and experience with soils, farm trials, seasonal market crops, cover crops, and farms as educational places.
• Field to Flavor: Multisensory Journeys: With Harold McGee’s Nose Dive as a model we, too, will learn how to design inquires based on savoring the world around us. We will learn about the evolution of flavor, aroma, mouthfeel and the so-called "X factor” through multisensory place-based taste explorations. Explorations might include sensory assessment, participatory culinary breeding networks, documentation arts, field trips, and study abroad possibilities including food security and cocoa innovation in Trinidad and Tobago (for more information, see the Study Abroad website).
• Lands, Educations, and Histories: Guided by mentor texts, interviews, and autobiographical writing, we will explore our own land, education, and food histories. We will put these individual and collective histories in conversation with histories of farming and land-based education: from family and ancestral stories passed from generation to generation, to schoolhouses, land-grant colleges, agricultural extension units, cooperative and mutual aid societies, and efforts to reassert Traditional Ecological Knowledge.
• Growing Solidarities: Throughout the program, we will meet Evergreen faculty, community farmers, agriculture educators, youth, food justice activists, community elders and mentors. We will have opportunities to attend seasonal events, including the Northwest Chocolate Festival (Fall), Harvest Festival (Fall), Kennedy Creek Salmon Migration (Fall) Farmworker Justice Day (Winter), Prairie Appreciation Day (Spring). These connections could lead to future internship, teaching, and research opportunities. Note: There is a spring quarter required overnight field trip fee Monday 29 April- Thursday 2 May for the spring case study of WA wheat.

This program is coordinated with Greener Foundations for first-year students. Greener Foundations is Evergreen’s in-person 2-quarter introductory student success course sequence, which provides first-year students with the skills and knowledge they need to thrive at Evergreen. Student joining in winter quarter that are expected to take Greener Foundations will be prompted to register for a 2-credit Greener Foundations course in addition to this 14-credit program during registration. Students that took Greener Foundations in fall quarter will be automatically registered in winter quarter to complete the 4-credits of Greener Foundations.

Fall Anticipated Credit Equivalencies

6 - Experiential Learning: Land and Belonging (4 credits if in Greener Foundations)

4 - Land Education and History

4 - Farm and Community Agriculture Practicum

2 - Field to Flavor: Foodways Lab