Working with Enthusiasm!

One of the most troubling aspects about America’s food system is that so many people are unaware that it is broken. When food is easily accessible at the grocery store, there’s no need for people to think any further than checking off their shopping list.

In my time with Montana FoodCorps, I’ve encountered a great many people who aren’t interested in changing the system. When they can afford to pick up what they need at the grocery store every week, it becomes awfully hard to convince them that something’s wrong.

Lame Deer is an entirely different experience. For people living paycheck to paycheck, the flaws of the system become obvious. They can’t afford what they’d like at the grocery store. What the grocery store has is neither fresh nor affordable because of the distance it travels to get here. Transversely, people can rarely afford to drive the 100 miles it takes to reach quality food. And all of these challenges are readily acknowledged by everyone who lives here.

Honor Ceremony at the Pow-Wow

 Because Lame Deer fully recognizes these challenges, my gardening project has been embraced with enthusiasm by the community. The Extension Office here has become my best friend as well as the Club’s primary sponsor for the garden. Co-workers now stop by my office to chat about caring for their tomatoes or to share sunflower seeds, kids bring me daily reports of the number of flowers on our strawberry plants, and I give tours to kids of the garden at my house and get them to try arugula. The Club welcomed me to the community with an honor ceremony at their annual PowWow, following which I was engulfed by the town's gardening population.

This week I met with the Greenhouse manager for Little Big Horn College on the neighboring Crow Reservation, to learn that we have exactly the same agenda. Her program runs a demonstration garden, offers a goldmine of gardening information within the community, and promotes the health and economic benefits that local produce offers. She is developing community surveys, finding partners, and spreading the word. She left my office with a list of plants the greenhouse will donate to the Club, and left me thrilled and impressed that this community is so ready to work to address the many challenges of food insecurity here. I hope that we can develop a partnership to increase the reach of both our gardens and raise awareness about the feasibility of growing our own produce in this region.

For the first time this week I worked in the garden with Club kids. I had them help me mix soil in pallet- beds and then each child planted a seed of their choosing in a milk carton. By the end of the hour, there were seeds everywhere, milk cartons had already been spilled and everyone was elbow deep in the damp soil making mud pies.

Though I’ve yet to establish order in the garden, the enthusiasm I’m working with makes every step far more fun since I’m working to moderate energy instead of having to relentlessly build it myself. One of the most important lessons I’m taking away from this year is that change comes from energy, but if there isn’t energy then change can’t happen no matter how much cheer leading I’m willing to take on. I feel privileged that I get to experience and learn about both sides of this challenge!