This year, Carleton’s opening convocation marked an important landmark: it was the 30th time that the senior class has blown bubbles onto the audience during the processional. And that is as it should be, since President Oden reminded us that New Year’s Day really should have been in the fall, and what better way to celebrate it than with bubbles?
Opening convocation is an old tradition, but it was a new experience for the Class of 2013. Take it from me, freshmen: Oden always mentions New Year’s. The other thing we always do at Opening Convo is to have a remarkable individual deliver the opening address. Gary Nabhan has broad interests and excels in all of them. He is an ethnobotanist, food folklorist, author of several books, recipient of a MacArthur Genius Fellowship, and champion of local eating and sustainable agriculture movements across the country. ENTS students read his work in class.
Nabhan posed to us this question: “Just what is it that we want to cross our lips? What do we want to be made of? What do we want to taste like when we in our turn are eaten?” Well, I don’t quite know what I want to taste like, but the question is a timely one. Our global foodshed – the equivalent of our watershed – is under threat from climate change, poor land practices that erode soil irreversibly, and an overreliance on a handful of commercial crops that allows heirloom varieties of seed and livestock to go extinct. Something has got to change if we want our descendants to eat as well as we do. Fortunately, movements to preserve the foodshed are gaining steam. Many have touched Carleton already, such as Food Truth week and Eat the Lawn, the new vegetable garden between Laird and Olin. Nabhan believes that preserving local food biodiversity depends on us, the young people. “We must re-link our sense of taste to our sense of place,” he says, and we can do it.
