Why I Chose to be a Practicum Student: Kim

Coming at food through an education in art has allowed me to encounter food as an interplay of texture, color, and flavor outside of more traditional starting points like source and nutritional value or adherence to a specific cultural format. I have conceptually been able to play on ideas of the seasonal as emotional and environmentally responsive in an urban sense (what do we feel drawn to eating when the city is wet and full of smog, when it is bright and packed tight with bodies), and to think about feeding ourselves and our community as partially caloric but also partially lyric or poetic.

While this is a beautiful way to be able to work, I lack pieces of underpinning systematic and scientific knowledge in the area of food production itself, and an element of self sufficiency in the production of the food I work with. I want to bring my culinary practise outside of the kitchen, to engage in a way of making food that is not based around buying and plating, not focused on immediate outcome during a day or week but instead on the intentionality and sufficiency of a durational practise with, and commitment to, the land and the people who work with it.

I think there is a spiritual element of a rural agriculture practise, of living closely with the spaces that harbour and produce the food that keeps us alive. I am curious about what my heart will feel like when I commit my brain and body to living in and studying in such a place for a short time, with people who make this commitment for whole years or lifetimes.