I Feel Good

Not quite in the James Brown sense (though that too), but I feel good because I was reminded of why I love what I am doing, that being working for the Yale Sustainable Food Project, as well as being a student at Yale. I had almost forgotten, but an event we put on tonight excited and engaged me and... made me feel really good.

Allow me to preface this with a brief statement about how burnt out I was only 24 hours ago. After spending the ENTIRE weekend working on the Harvest Festival we had at the farm yesterday, running hither and thither in the giant Farm Truck, only to miss the meal we had prepared for it, I was tired, frustrated, hungry, and felt like I wanted to drop out of school, or at least drop out of my Chemistry class. Which is to say, I was mostly just hungry. And had a lot of homework. I wanted to hop behind the wheel of that big black behemoth of a Chevy that I had spent so much time in (too much time in, really. It even broke down on me.) and drive into the distance to find some really meaningful work; that is, not Chem homework. But instead I stayed up til 1:30 doing my problem set.

I awoke this morning knowing that I had a LONG day ahead of me. My mondays are long as it is (I have class from 9-5), and then I was working on ANOTHER YSFP event. This one was rather different, though. It was an event put on by the Black and Green Initiative, something created during Black History Month last year by Tamara, an African-American student here who works at the Afro-American cultural center, and myself. We put on a film festival dealing with issues of food and agriculture and how it related to the Black community. This event was a panel discussion about "Working for a healthier mind, body, soul, and planet," and had been at least partially born of my own brain (but mostly Tamara's--credit where credit's due).

We brought in three speakers to talk about healthy cosmetics (cosmetics are really some of the most toxic things out there. Go to www.SafeCosmetics.org if you don't believe me) and sustainable food/sustainable living to an audience comprised of mostly Black women. We had people not only from Yale, but also from Southern Connecticut University and from the University of New Haven--this is a big deal, to get non-Yale students at Yale-sponsored events, and I thought it was a major indicator of our success. I spoke a bit myself about the role of sustainable food and healthy cosmetics in the lives of minorities. I spoke of my own experience of living in Northern NM, of having the dichotomy of LANL, one of the biggest producer of toxins in the US, and small family farms cohabitate the same region. . One of the main purposes of the Black and Green Initiative is to bridge the perceived gap between sustainable food and other products and people of color, because there's no getting around it--sustainable food is perceived as elitist. It is generally more expensive and less accessible. This is a big problem, one that needs to be addressed from many angles to be effectively combated. But my general take on it is this: putting safe and healthy things ON and IN our bodies is one of the most effective means of empowerment for minorities/people of color. It is a way to take control of our own health--we as consumers have this choice, and it's an important one to make.

After the panel, a freshman at Yale, an African-American girl, came up to me wanting to know more. So I talked. A lot. And she wanted to know more... so I kept talking. I realized how much I have learned working for the YSFP for the last year and a half. I realized how much I love sharing this information with people--it's a really good feeling to know something well enough to teach it to others. I realized how good it felt to get people interested in these issues. And the crowd as a whole really was engaged and interested. People asked a lot of questions, and thought about the answers, and left feeling scared to use their mascara. This is a good thing. The biggest hurdle in the sustainable food movement is education. And I feel like people left our panel feeling like they had learned something, and with the resources to find out more.

Don't get me going--I could talk about this stuff all night. But I have homework, and that's okay.

Wow. How cool.