CSAdinner

Tell all the artists you love to check it out here:  CSAlove.tumblr.com/callforart.

Yeah!

CSAlove is starting to branch out and make its way in the world, working toward the exhibition and events later this summer.  Have you told all the artists you know about the Call for Art yet?   Please do!  The deadline is 5/20, so there is plenty of time.  I can’t wait to see what rolls in!

The Cultural Studies course that this project grew from ends this week.  The class was  an extended conversation about the ways in which the Sciences and the Humanities interact and affect each other.  This project goes right to the middle of one of those knots—looking at how CSAs create a cultural experience out of something that could seen as “just” a matter of biology, chemistry, or economics (processing chemicals, growing plants, digesting food, distributing food, etc).  However—and I think, luckily—life is never “just” that.  As humans move about in the world, there are so many layers of meaning behind each motion.

The assignment we were given was to create an intervention in a problem of science and culture.  Does this sound simple?  It isn’t, it is tricky and complicated to decide what is worthy of intervention, and how to explain ourselves around it. 

As my classmates and I wrestled with what to do for this project, I reflected a lot on some of the wonderful women I’d met and listened to during the Women and Water Rights series at the U of M this winter, including the amazing Vandana Shiva, and also a really touching Tim O’Brien interview on MPR. 

I’d decided to do something about CSAs, planning to do something on how pseudo-CSA or organics were encroaching on true CSAs.  As I listened to all these stories, though, it began to hit me how the really powerful actions were ones that came from the heart, that grew out of love—maybe love that is embedded in the pain of surviving something terrible—but out of love nonetheless.  The actions out of love were strong and effective.  And so I realized that intervention is not always about stopping something that is bad, it can also be about growing something that is “good”—meaningful, supportive, and usually, of-the-people.

A CSA is truly of-the-people.  Growing your own food is certainly of-the-people, too, but it is not likely that most of us (in the city especially) are yet ready to grow it all ourselves.  So we put our trust in farmers to take on the task of feeding the masses.  Unfortunately, things can be pretty bleak for farmers these days, with many of them barely surviving, despite working their tails off all the time.  So the CSA tries to mediate this difficulty, giving the farmers a skeleton of guaranteed income that they can begin their work with.  In exchange, the CSA members benefit not only from knowing they’ve done something helpful, but they also gain so much more in the experience of opening that box each week, and that is what we will explore and communicate here.

We also talked in class about how ideas can spread really quickly these days, with all our modern modes of communication.  My task at hand is to spread the CSA love!  I welcome your assistance.

Thank you so much for stopping to visit.

love,

julie

p.s.  CSAlove on facebook and twitter

East Side Garden Corps

Here we find another great example of people doing interesting, enriching things with their relationship to food—they even have a CSA of their own you can join, as well as family and children’s cooking classes.  Wow!