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This first growing experience led me to work on Elawa Farm, a small-scale farm in Chicago. I loved the scavenger hunt I went on through the leaves of haricot verts when harvesting its beans, the way the snap pea tendrils would adoringly wrap around the neighboring tomato plants, and the way zucchini would grow so large without any remorse.
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As a ceramicist, I had always been excited about working with my hands, so physically growing my food was exactly in my wheelhouse. I spent a summer interning with The Organic Gardener, learning a lot and falling even more in love with food. Inspired, I made it my mission to work for her. Nolan left home to work on various communal farms, and returned to start The Organic Gardener, a company that installs gardens at homes, restaurants, schools, and corporations around Chicago. The memoir chronicles Nolan’s experience of growing up as a Jewish girl on the North Shore of Chicago, an upbringing identical to my own. Hillary makes ravioli during a trip to Italy In an effort to satisfy my desire to learn about our food system, my mom bought me a book, “ From the Ground Up: A Food Grower’s Education in Life, Love, and the Movement That’s Changing the Nation” by Jeanne Nolan. “Corn is terrible! We need to stop consuming processed goods with corn syrup – it’s causing so many human and environmental health problems!” I would exclaim to them, a new nugget of knowledge daily. I would come home after school frantic to share newfound information about our food system with my parents. The class turned out to be a lot of work but it exposed me to what I want to devote my life to. How much work could it be to talk about food in school, right? It seemed like the easier choice was the class about food. My junior year, I got to choose between two elective classes: Computer Engineering and a class called Food: Science, Systems, and Society. My discovery of the true complexities of our food system began when I was in high school. My most cherished memories all surround food: listening to the Dave Matthew’s Band with my parents on our back porch every night of the summer while grilling our family’s famous lamb burgers, harvesting Sungold cherry tomatoes with my mom in our garden talking about my life at Colby College and eating countless dinners of eggplant parmesan with my friends at Colby. Hillary bags a fish during an ecological research trip with Colby Collegeįood has always played a leading role in my life, even before I discovered that it could be a career.