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Milking goats, painting sunscreen on baby trees, tanning animal skins, bottling tomato sauce, harvesting wild greens, fermenting wine, gathering acorns, coagulating cheese, raking hazelnuts, hunting mushrooms, freezing goat gelato and doing the dishes: a few experiences you wouldn’t expect from your typical study-abroad program. Opting out of taking the university’s offer to politely go to class and do my homework while outside the country, I instead joined the ranks of “WWOOFers.

WWOOF stands for World-Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms but is also known as “willing workers on organic farms,” an elite force comprised of students and young people who can’t find work for an actual wage, but also families on odysseys, fellow farmers taking a break from their own land, and alternative holiday seekers and travelers. They hail from all corners of the world to get a taste of the dirt in another.

I traveled from the Mediterranean weather of California to the Mediterranean nation of Italy. And although the climates and geographical sizes just about matched, the culture climates clashed.

Fresh off the plane from middle-class city suburbia, the only connection to my food I had fostered thus far was with the checkout clerk at Safeway. Although Italy has only a few tenths of a percent more farmers in the population than the US (with less than 2% of the population as farmers), you discover every last patch of dirt planted with vegetables. Like the US, Italy is no longer an agrarian society, but they seem to have maintained a much stronger bond with the land and what it can produce.

From the ubiquitous backyard and urban gardens to the home wineries and chicken coops, Italians maintain the knowledge and desire to know where their food comes from. This appears to be mostly in order to obtain the right produce for those old family recipes--and so avoid being scolded by Grandma. The value they place on fresh and local food stems from the obvious values of taste and nutrition that only local seasonal produce can provide, sealed within the aromas of traditional recipes. Even if a young person doesn’t find the time or space to garden, or never really learned how, most at least retain the necessary cooking skills to prepare their favorite family recipes, and know where to get the right ingredients at the market.

I discovered a slightly different way of living that comes with connection to the land: a lifestyle based on a self-sufficiency ethic and taking seriously the ways things were done once upon a time. The farms I worked partake in a kind of slower life, in that the activities are rooted in one place and committed to the home, family and surrounding land. A colossal pride of place runs rampant throughout Italy, unlike my hopping and jumping unchained American compatriots.

It is no wonder that the international organization Slow Food started in Italy to preserve all of these values, local food traditions and this way of life. It is a life in which people still work their butts off—and enjoy their time working with their hands, not just their heads.

The country also believes in maximizing their nationwide self-sufficiency, including importing as little food as possible. All the produce I saw in the supermarkets came from within Italy. On the other hand, although California is a leading agricultural producer, it is still a net importer of food—59% coming from outside its borders. And much of this trade is even redundant. For example, California imports tons of fresh strawberries from around the world at the same time it is exporting its strawberries in season. There are countless other examples of fossil fuel-wasting and polluting practices of unfair global trade.

During my “agri-cultural” exploration of the old world, as I tried to glean as much as possible of the surviving traditional ways, I succeeded in cultivating my own commitment to the land––and all the people, creatures and organisms dependent upon it for life. And I reveled in the tasty good food, enjoyed in tasty company, that came from the land and makes life worth living.

I am bringing back my own need to mix the compost from my food scraps back into my patch of Berkeley terrain where I will then push in seeds. And, of course, I yearn for my own chickens and goats—for the fresh eggs, milk, cheese, yogurt and meat—knowing exactly what they’ve been fed, not only for my enjoyment of fresh, healthy food, but also for my sanity in touching and interacting with the land, just in case I get too swept away in the swift river of city life to remember my roots.

[This piece was written by Maren Poitras and provided courtesy of the Society for Agriculture and Food Ecology. – Ed.]

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