Cookies and Skepticism

Yesterday was our first attempt at a publicity stunt. To raise awareness for our first big event this coming Monday (you can find some more info on this below), we decided to put out a table, give out cookies, and maybe tell people a little bit about our event. However, what started out as a publicity stunt actually turned into a lesson: people are skeptical of free food.

I don’t remember who said we should make cookies, but we made the decision at our meeting this past Sunday, and decided to have another meeting/ baking session on Tuesday night. We made some delicious vegan oatmeal raisin cookies. We ate a lot of dough (despite Austin’s reproachful remarks), and we also had a lot of laughs. Within a few hours, we had dozens of tiny cookies to pass out at lunch the following day.

I’m going to take a moment to describe the table setup for you, because some of our readers don’t go to school here (Hi Mom!). At Principia, we have the Concourse. There is a long, wide hall with mailboxes. The dining hall branches off of this main hall, and there is a convenient area at the dining hall’s exit where groups and clubs on campus can bombard people with information as they leave their meals. Few of these groups have free food, so you can imagine people’s surprise when we greeted them with cookies.

What we didn’t realize is that when you hand out free food, people want to know what you’re up to and what you want from them. The truth is, we didn’t actually want anything. We just wanted to share cookies. The good news is, a free cookie is a free cookie. Once we convinced people that they were, in fact, no strings attached (and also delicious), it was easy to tell them a bit about our project on Monday.

This little event made me think that maybe we have a natural skepticism of food. Maybe we’re naturally programmed to wonder where our food came from. So when someone offers you a free cookie, you wonder why they’re giving you a free cookie. You may also wonder what’s in it, since you don’t want to eat anything weird. So why don’t we question where the food in the grocery store comes from, or the ingredients in a Twinkie? I think it’s because we’re so used to these things that we forget that before a loaf of bread appeared on a supermarket shelf, it was baked, and before that, it was flour, and before that, wheat. That wheat was grown, but do we know where? Do we know how? Do we know what else is in the bread? Most of the time, the answer is no, but we still buy it without question. Where is our skepticism then?

This is what our garden is all about. On Monday, we will lay the groundwork for Principia’s first permaculture garden, and we are getting students and staff and community members to help us. When they see homegrown carrots in the dining hall, they will honestly be able to say they know where those carrots came from. I think this is a beautiful thing. Not only is this garden bringing Principians closer to their food, but they can also take pride in witnessing the fruits of their labor. As the sowing, the reaping. Literally.

-Jess