The Middlebury Food Blog

It's a new summer at the farm and a new crew is already hard at work bringing delicious food to the Middlebury community! We can't wait to see what they grow this year....

Sara Bachman is a junior feb from Maine. She is a  religion major and environmental studies. Sara says that when she thinks ahead to this summer "I feel full when I am dancing and moving, outside and breathing, in the dirt and gardening, looking in someone's eyes, listening and sharing. When I think of this summer I see sunshine over the hill in the field. I feel hot days full of dirt, color, sweat, laughter, silence and breeze. And, I think of the incredible people, the lesson we will teach each other and the love we will share! It will be beautiful." Sara was also one of our fall interns this past year at the farm.

Carly Shumaker is a junior from Liverpool, PA.  Carly's favorite hobbies include gardening, painting and throwing pottery, reading, and playing the violin. Carly says "the organic garden is my favorite space on campus, so I'm most excited to spend hours upon hours there every day and have my entire day revolve around the garden this summer.  I heard that 70% of attractions in Vermont are closed during the winter months, so I'm really excited to be here for the summer and have the ability to travel around the state experiencing things that I can't during the school year." Carly is an Environmental Studies and Anthropology joint major, i.e., Human Ecology. Carly also loves maple syrup which you can see from the photo above!

Ari Lattanzi is a junior from the Silicon Valley suburbs, Bay Area, CA. Ari is an International Studies major with focuses in Political Science and Latin America (but if there were a Food Studies major, I would be one!) with a Global Health minor. Ari says "I spend a lot of my time volunteering with the local fire department and ambulance service. I really love horses and dancing and singing and cuddling and rock climbing and running outside. How can you top days spent gardening in the sun with wonderful people?"

Dear Weybridge,

Hiya! How’s it going? What are you up to? What’s shakin’? (Hopefully not bacon in the cast irons!) I’m just writing to confess to you after all these years something important—since I’m leaving soon, it’s important that I’m honest, right?—I love you.

I love you so much I don’t know where I’d be without you (probably wasting away somewhere in Starr or Painter or worse—Milliken!) I love coming home to the smell of onions and curry and leaving hours later with the same delectable waft emanating from my own sweater—a sweet reminder of people who care. I love staying up late with you, hooting and hollering and eating pickles, I love how you always play VPR. I love how I hear folk fiddling, jaw harping, cymbal imitations—and most of all, whistling—echoing out from behind every closed door, through the floor, through the walls, through the roof. I love how you feed me blueberries and cream at 4:00 a.m. I love how you always share your coffee and kimchi. I love how we can argue for an hour on Sunday at 6:00 only to disperse, go to sleep, wake up and realize we’re all afloat at Midd in the same old ship.

I mean, there have been times, Weybridge, when I thought we were done for. Over. Kaputt! Like the semester you didn’t do any of the dishes, or when you kept leaving the butter out for the flies at night, or for some mysterious reason—a mystery! But I’m alright with not knowing if you are—the heat broke in January and it took you a week to fix it. But it’s ok now. The heat’s fixed…as for the dishes—you haven’t changed, but I don’t really care, because—I have (for the better!).

Thank you for teaching me so much about living! How to preserve tomatoes, potatoes, carrots (and sanity!); How to make applesauce (and how much I hate it!); How to smash pennies; How to speak Russian (at least a proverb’s worth!); How to twist; How to prank (and how not to); How to be more social (still working on that one though); How to make forests out of trash bags and broken sticks; how to…………

But most of all, thanks for being the only place I can really call home here and mean it.

I’ll miss the syrup, yeah, our trips to Iceland, our walks late at night down on the railroad tracks, all our half-crazed (or wholly-crazed) chats.  I’ll miss the way you listen when I moan. I’ll miss listening to you revel. I’ll miss so much about you, my house, my home, my Weybridge, but most of all, I’ll miss you: you brilliant, marvelous, ingenious, awe-inspiring, amazing, creative, elusive, sometimes reclusive, charming, gregarious, diverse, wanton, weird, WONDERFUL WEYBEANS!

I’ll miss you all. I’ll miss you a lot. It’s been a long long time already, but hopefully it’s not over for you and me.

Ok, that’s all for now. Tally ho!

Love,

Veronica

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7Id9caYw-Y

During the next three weeks, the mcofarm is sponsoring a film festival about, what else?, FOOD. We will be showing three movies. The first, Dirt!, describes soil's formation, degradation, and everything in between. Dirt! will be shown on Tuesday 12 April at 7 pm in Bicentennial Hall room 220. The next film, Colony, carries the tagline "No Bees. No Honey. No Work. No Money." It tells the story of colony collapse disorder through the eyes of veteran and new beekeepers. Colony will be shown Tuesday 19 April at 7 pm in Bicentennial Hall room 219. Ingredients describes the local food movement through the words of chefs and farmers. Featuring noted "foodies" like Alice Waters and Peter Hoffman, Ingredients explores food movements occurring across the country. Links to the trailers are below. Please, come! The more friends to share these deliciously beautiful films with, the merrier.

To recap: 
Dirt!, 12 April, 7 pm, Bi Hall 220
Colony, 19 April, 7 pm, Bi Hall 219
Ingredients, 26 April, 7 pm, Bi Hall 216

Do you have any feedback or advice? Leave a comment and let us know!

thanks to Annie Ulrich '12 for all her work on this!

It may have snowed more than 10 inches in the past 24 hours here in Middlebury, but this kind of weather hasn't deterred us from thinking about spring, and dare I say it...summer at the garden!

We've got big plans for some big changes at the garden this summer. We're hoping to start building a barn that will house a wash station and cold storage and other elements that will increase our efficiency.

Have any suggestions? Let us know! We're still very much in the planning phases.
Thanks to Max Odland '12 for all his work on this project!

Here at MCOG, we are psyched about the launch of goodfoodjobs.com! The innovative site does just what it promises, by aggregating some of the best jobs available in the ever-burgeoning food and agriculture job market.

We particularly like goodfoodjobs.com because they recently featured our very own David Dolginow and his job working with Barney Hodges (also a Midd alum) at Vermont Refrigerated Storage. Check out www.goodfoodjobs.com/blog/ to read the full story.

Dave got his start with a MCOG internship….what will you do with your MCOG education??!?

by: katie willis


Y'all know that Weybridge doesn't usually have chocolate, right? Because it isn't, like, local. 


But sometimes, when two of our lovely housemates, who love to salvage any food they can, find themselves in Burlington rifling through the Champlain Chocolates trash, they bring home fifty pounds of pure joy. That's right, currently the Weybridge kitchen table is home to FIFTY POUNDS of chili dark chocolate and salty caramel milk chocolate. Man oh man is it delicious. And it was free. FREE. Do you hear me? I'm screaming FREE CHOCOLATE at you.


Of course, we don't always get fifty pounds of chocolate or fifty pounds of anything. Sometimes its eggplant, mangoes, cucumbers, peppers, lemons, and limes, papayas, and bananas. The best thing, or so I've heard, to find is a compost bin behind the supermarket filled to the brim with muffins, donuts, rolls, breads, cookies, and cakes. And who knows, that jelly-filled donut may be nasty? But hey, it didn't cost me anything.


How does Weybridge feel about this?  Uh... We love it. Duh! Free chocolate. We are poor chocolate-deprived college students, filling ourselves with cheap, unsatisfying dining hall chocolate chips. Which are fine for a while, but nothing hits the spot like a mint chocolate coin.  


But we do have to ask another question.  Why is Vermont one of the hungriest states in the country, when we have dumpsters and bins full of perfectly edible vegetables and tasty desserts?  Why are grocery stores throwing all this food away?  Is it more than just the fault of the supermarket?  Do we not scoff at "damaged" goods and "ugly" produce? 


So while we say, "Oh yeah, we'll take that yummy chocolate off your hands." We'd rather see this "trash" turned into meals, given to the hungry, the needy. Next time you go to the grocery store, buy that ugly lemon, or it might just end up at Weybridge.

Did you come to the Fall Feast?
Are you still craving parmesan rosemary breadsticks and goat cheese beet salad?

If so, click the link the below to relive the delicious food and find yourself.

Because we were featured in a short film created by Nikhil Ramburn.
Whoa! Who knew you could be famous by just showing up to eat local, delicious, free food? Not me. 

And if you didn't get your fifteen seconds of fame, come to the SPRING FEAST!!!! You never know, we could be featured on CNN or Ryan Seacrest. 

 http://blogs.middlebury.edu/middmag/2010/11/29/eat-drink-and-be-merry/

Although Middlebury doesn't (yet) have an offical program to study food and agriculture academically, an overwhelming number of students are choosing to feature FOAG in their graded assignments. Over the next few weeks, we will be posting student work that exemplifes the reasons why the liberal arts curriculum is the ideal place to study food and agriculture.

This week, check out Elori Kramer's ('13.5) final project for Foundations in Women and Gender Studies. Elori decided to make this film because she wanted to "understand the people that makes this place" that she has decided to spend these four years. One of the farmers in the film noted that women are uniquely suited to the burgeoning alternative market of small scale, organic agricuture because "women possess the ability to think outside the box, which is what we need right now."

Enjoy!