The GARDENSS Will Teach Us Lab Notebooks
“...like most humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it.”
Food underlies our way of life perhaps more than any other good. It provides us with nutrition and is literally sunlight transformed into digestible means. But it’s also much more than this. We set our clocks and our days by when we eat giving food the power to define our routines. It also drives culture often coming to define entire nations as a type of food that people love to eat. Regardless of its importance (or perhaps because of it), food and all the systems that it is tied to, often remains unstudied. We go to 40,000 square foot buildings where food of all types line aisle after aisle and all of it is replenished daily without us wondering where it came from or about the labor that went into creating it. Even for those of us who love to cook, who tweak recipes until they’ve reached mouth-watering perfection, we still remain removed from the source of our food and the processes that bring it to our kitchens. And yet somehow, as Fisher writes, food and love are so intertwined that our hunger for one is often indistinguishable from our hunger from the other.
For the GARDENSS (Growing Agriculture, Recipe Development, Eating Nutrients, Soil Science) project, students spent several weeks embarking on a multistep project that included the following:
Building raised garden beds
Planning and planting vegetables in those beds
Conducting ongoing soil testing and observations of plant growth
Experimenting with cooking processes
Crafting our own recipes
Each step of the way students read texts, such as Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America and watched documentaries, such as Kiss the Ground. At the core of their work, they explored the question “How do the ways that food is grown and cooked define our lives and our worlds?”
Below, you’ll find each student’s lab notebook which includes the activities that day, successes and challenges, photos, and reflections on the texts we encountered throughout the unit.
