Terrain V01 - Journal - Page 23
Sterling College | 21
dining ‘pop-ups” around the city, and
working at farmers markets. During lulls
in the market, he read Wendell Berry’s
“Think Little” essays. “The timing of me
reading these particular words at that
time….” Ashland says, his thoughts trailing off. “It wasn’t serendipity, really, but
let’s just say those words stuck with me.”
Faced by a “mountain of things that
needed to be done” during the Black
Lives Matter protests in 2020, he kept
Berry’s message in mind: “Little steps
become a large change. You don’t have
to do it all at once,” he says. During the
protest, Ashland began distributing
“protestor survival packs” assembled by
fellow student Emily Wade and her husband, and wound up working with a Louisville chef who is also a trained medic to
help protestors keep safe.
Photos: Class Four
#1 in the country by the Real Food
Challenge, a nationwide initiative to
make college food more local, sustainable, and healthful. “I knew I had to
get into that Sterling kitchen,” he says.
He set his sights on Vermont. “I was all
set to go snowboarding with hippies,” he
adds, laughing.
But while visiting the Craftsbury, Vermont, campus he learned about the
Wendell Berry Farming Program;
and a graduate he met while in Vermont strongly suggested he apply.
“The free tuition is huge,” he said.
“It enabled me not to put myself into
crippling debt in order to get this education I desired.”
He recalls a moment in draft animal class
with Rick Thomas, when his mom called
on his cell phone. “I said, mom, I’ve got
two 3,000-pound animals at the end of
these reins. I really have to get off the
phone,” he says, laughing. He found
his community in Louisville, where he
moved his second semester. In addition
to his course work, he began hosting
Jailed overnight during the protests,
Ashland became incensed that the only
food served to him and his fellow detainees, after many hours of incarceration, were ham sandwiches which a
Rastafari among their number—following the religion’s dietary restrictions on
meat—could not eat. In the hours after
their release, Ashland and a group of
volunteers, with the support of a Louisville chef who gave them access to
his restaurant kitchen, turned out 1,600
vegan meals for protestors. The program
is, “definitely the kind of place where you
have to take an active part in your own
education. You have to determine for
yourself what you are going to get out of
it.” It shaped his long-term goal of running an educational farm with a restaurant that would demonstrate the viability of locally sourced food. In the end, he
says, he “couldn’t imagine how it could
have all turned out any better.”
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