Day 13: The true meaning of "outdoorsy" and "down-to-earth"

Philip Ackerman-Leist's home, courtesy of Natalie Bekkouche.

Yesterday we traveled to Green Mountain College (GMC), toured their campus farm (Cerridwen Farm), had dinner with some students, and met Philip Ackerman-Leist, Director of the GMC Masters in Sustainable Food Systems and an instrumental leader in the VT Higher Education Food Systems Consortium and planning this study tour. For today's blog post, we were tasked with reflecting on the farmers' lifestyles we've seen and comparing them to our own.

As we've visited farms and gardens over the last two weeks, we've seen a wide array of lifestyles and models of farming. We've seen family-run dairy farms where the family lives on the farm and wakes up at 4am to milk and feed the cows, we've seen college farms where students live on campus and wake up at 6am to do morning farm chores and professors or farm managers come from off campus at sunrise, we've seen school gardens or vegetable farms carefully tended to during the days, and today, we had the wonderful opportunity to harvest wild greens and eat dinner at Philip's homestead.

Philip and his wife Erin live in a remote house that they built on Tunket Road in Pawlet, VT with their three children. Though I haven't spoken to him about his experiences as a homesteader, I know he wrote a whole book about it called Up Tunket Road. From what I can tell, he writes about the complexities of living a simple life somewhat separated from modern life in terms of its economic systems, food systems, social systems, electr(on)ic systems, and water systems, among others. After driving up a long, bumpy road and spending a few hours at his house, it's clear that he and his family grow and harvest an overwhelming amount of their own food and use a herd of devon cattle that provide milk, beef, and manual labor. Their house is definitely untraditional and I could tell almost all of the structures and systems were built by hand. I had a lovely time at Philip's, enjoying the beautiful early summer weather, wildcrafting and learning about plants I previously thought of as inedible weeds, and chatting with his family, neighbors, and our group, knowing my phone was on Airplane mode and that I was in a space independent of the technology I am essentially attached to most of the time.

I've thought a lot about my own lifestyle over the last two weeks, and the lifestyle to which I grew up accustomed. I've definitely been in a sort of culture shock, and am forced to think about the different kinds of lives people lead. I believe 100% that the farmers we've met are connected to their land and surroundings in a way I've never experienced and am not sure I ever will experience. They lead sustainable lives in many ways, using renewable energies, being aware of their carbon footprints, eating food either they cultivated or from neighbors they know well, and supporting their local economy when buying what they can't provide for themselves. In the house I grew up in, we ate processed foods, relied on gas for hot running water and electricity, had lots of technological gadgets, boasted a bright green, manicured lawn complete with white fertilizer every few weeks, and drove our gas-guzzling Chevy Suburban down the road and all over town to buy groceries and other goods from people we didn't know. Growing up in a NYC suburb, I always considered myself more outdoorsy and/or down-to-earth than my friends - we'd go hiking and camping a few times a year, we always took more adventurous vacations than my friends (who'd sit on a beach somewhere), like skiing or ranching and hiking in Montana, and we paid attention to food labels and cooked vegetables often.

I'm realizing it's incredibly hard to write down a description of my own upbringing in a way that any reader will truly understand, and compare it to the farming lifestyles we've seen, but I can admit that my definition of outdoorsy and down-to-earth has changed. The word "sustainable" hardly crossed my path before my siblings and I went to college and learned about environmental issues, and as we talk about sustainable food systems and sustainable agriculture, I know I must lead a more sustainable lifestyle that is more connected to our land than the one I've known all my life.