When Greenfield Community College offered a new “Introduction to Food Systems” course this term as its first for-credit course in a “food and farms” emphasis, the expectation was that seven, eight or maybe nine people would sign up. Instead, the class immediately not only filled up with 21 students, but a waiting list had to be created.
That overwhelming response surprised even optimist Sandy Thomas, the special projects coordinator who’d been invited last year to look into setting up a sustainable food program at GCC.
“We’re in a flash point,” said Thomas, who had been a special projects coordinator at Northeast Sustainable Energy Association until 2008. “I feel like everything is coming together. You can’t walk around the corner without talking about food now. I think it’s timely and we had to do it.”
The timeliness of a for-credit course that takes a systems approach to look at something as basic as food — not to mention a potential two-year degree program at GCC about food and farming — can’t be overstated, believes teacher Abrah Jordan Dresdale.
“Droughts like we’ve had last summer (across 14 Midwestern and Western states), flooding like we had from Irene …. We’re going to likely see more and more of this, bizarre growing seasons, where the crops we’re used to planting are no longer going to be suitable,” said Dresdale, whose background combines degrees in sustainable landscape design, architecture and psychology as well as training in botany and herbalism and permaculture design. “That is definitely going to have an effect on our food prices.”
Those kinds of climate-change effects — along with growing awareness about how dependent the conventional food industry is on the limited fossil fuel supply and about the rise of obesity and diabetes and concern about the limited access poorer people have to nutritious food … are feeding the passions of a new generation to look at food and farming in a systemic way.
“There’s a burgeoning local food movement in the valley, nationally and internationally,” says the 30-year-old landscape designer, food systems planner and educator, who moved to the area to attend the Conway School of Landscape Design three years ago and now teaches classes in Northampton, Vermont and Wesleyan, Conn. “It’s a new concept to many people, in part because there’s been a strategic disconnect between food and knowing where the food comes from, because the vested corporations don’t necessarily want consumers to know the truth behind all of the implications. You go into the supermarket, and there’s the front of the house, where everything is ‘farm fresh.’ But what’s the back story behind the cows that are giving you your half and half? What are they eating, are they standing around in manure, crowded all day?”