If you’re walking past Hill Street and East University, you may be pleasantly surprised by the scent of fresh thyme, dill, and other mixed herbs. Spring planting has begun for Cultivating Community, a student organization that aims to develop “a closed-loop food system using gardening, composting, education, and research to improve human, community, and ecological health; access to local food; and diversion of waste”. Behind the Ginsburg Center lays a plot of soil where potatoes, tomatoes, green beans, cucumbers and a variety of herbs are waiting to sprout. When it comes time for harvest, the produce will be donated to the University’s cafeterias, and Washtenaw County’s food bank Food Gatherers.

Cultivating Community believes in the importance of knowing and understanding where our food comes from. As the distancing between food production and consumption grows, so has our ignorance as consumers. The average consumer can not tell you where and how their food was produced, processed and transported; and whether it was done so in ways that has caused harm to the land and human community it was grown in. Food production often occurs in locations so far and obscured from us, making it difficult for us to understand the implication of our participation in the global food system. Cultivating Community aims to build the campus and local’s community awareness of how the food system functions so that people can be empowered to act responsibly and effectively to change it.

If you are on campus this spring or summer, it’s not too late to get involved. Cultivating Community holds weekly drop-in gardening hours at the Ginsburg Center and at Matthaei Botanical Garden. There are also monthly field trips aimed at exposing volunteers to different aspects of the food system. This month, participants are going to the Catherine Ferguson Academy in Detroit, a school—one of only four nationally of its kind—that teaches young unwed mothers about farming and agriculture. Before the summer comes to a close, Cultivating Community also plans on making a trip to Tantre Farm in Ann Arbor, and a pick-your-own berry (and make-your-own jam) farm.

Cultivating Community is about hands-on learning. So get up from the couch, come out from the library, put down your books, roll up your sleeves, get your hands in the dirt, and reacquaint yourself with mother earth.

For more information about Cultivating Community, email Madeleine Morley or Stacy Mates.