My Farm to Fork Dinner, it was delicious! The picture really doesn’t do it justice, but it was definitely related to the post so…

Come to think of it, you rarely question where your dinner came from. Yes, you know that it was the chef on campus or your mom back at home who prepared it, but where did the ingredients come from in the first place? Who actually grew the vegetables, who raised the livestock? Who should we be thanking for the raw materials?

The answer is rather simple and straightforward, the farmers! But why is it that they don’t gain the appreciation for what they are doing? Oddly enough there is a sense of disconnect in our minds between the farmers and the food we eat, the same food that they were responsible for cultivating. Most of us are clueless about the identities and backgrounds of the people who grow the ingredients we put in our bodies, and only yesterday I was one of those people.

Thankfully Justine Vanden Heuvel and Mary Jo Dudley were able to educate me on this topic during a Q&A session right after Cornell Dining’s Farm to Fork meal. I learned a ton of new information about the farmers themselves and the NY agriculture, but here are just a few random things wrote down during the event:

• Cornell Farmerworker program was started by a group of CALS students, who spent a summer or a semester working on a farm, it seeks to improve the living and working conditions of farmers and their families through education and extension
• Many of the farm workers are improperly documented and obtain knowledge at the level of 6th grade
• These farmers hope to interact with local populations and learn what they can do to move up
• They live in constant fear of getting identified as undocumented
• NY wines compete great internationally
• Justine works to improve the production of wines and make the whole process more sustainable
• Walmart buys the majority of NY apples!

Well, there you have it!