A Food-Filled Path to Student Employment with Vassar Admissions

Hi, I’m Meghan McDermott, a senior intern at the office of admissions here at Vassar. A lot has changed since I was applying to Vassar in the winter of 2008, so before I launch into the topics of future blog entries (like all of the awesome things I’ve been up to in the Hudson Valley since matriculating in 2009) I’m going to give you a little taste of my journey to senior year.

Though my obsession with food goes way back, I first remember thinking critically about it in 2004, around the time when Morgan Spurlock’s film Supersize Me came out. I was in eighth grade at the time, and the film inspired a friend and I to conduct a study of how many fast-food ads were dominating commercial airwaves. Later, as an editor of my high school newspaper, I read a review for The Omnivore’s Dilemma and decided to pick up a copy. I was just getting really interested in the good food movement when I spoke with a Vassar admissions officer; the only question I remember asking her was about what Vassar was doing to bring more local foods to campus.

I can’t tell you exactly what she said (I honestly don’t remember) but it sounded good to me, and matriculating in the fall of 2009 I found myself blissfully happy with my college choice. Classes were engaging, the scenery was beautiful, people were helpful and the sense of community was absolutely everywhere. All of my classes were interesting, and I was already overwhelmed with the wealth of options for on-campus programming I found myself choosing from each weekend.  And yet, there seemed to be something missing.

I was working with a pre-major adviser in the sociology department when I decided to declare a psychology major. Soon after declaring psychology early, I enrolled (as a sophomore) in a course entitled “Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Food”. Due to popular demand, I had to fill out an application just to be in the class. I wrote about my interest in food and my as of yet untapped desire to approach the topic from an academic perspective, and I was in. In just a few months, that course changed the entire path of my career at Vassar.

Within a few weeks I knew that I was in for something special. The class required two regular meetings in addition to maintaining a small garden plot and completing field work on a local apple orchard. Having come from a divided home in urban Chicago and rural central Illinois, I was immediately drawn to the fertile, mountainous, diversified farming community of upstate New York. Through my field work adventures with two of my classmates I was able to begin to fill the gap I’d started to notice in my freshman year.

Working closely with our anthropology professor, the two students from my field work assignment and I decided to launch a chapter of Slow Food on campus. Slow Food is an international organization that strives to promote good, clean, and fair food around the world. The amazing work they do warrants a whole other blog post, so I’ll save that for a separate entry, but suffice it to say that we very quickly realized we had tapped into a deep well of (feel free to insert your best “hungry for knowledge” pun here) Vassar students.

In April of that academic year, Slow Food Vassar became the fastest certified organization (meaning our student body had voted, unanimously, to add our organization to the list of 120+ official student programming bodies) in recent history at the college. By that time I had elected to move into one of our cooperative living options on campus, and after being welcomed into that community I quickly began to recognize the importance of coming together over a home-cooked meal and the beauty of living with an exceptionally diverse group of people.

In my second directly food-oriented class at Vassar, “Food, Culture & Globalization” I watched the Austrian documentary Our Daily Bread, a narrative-free exposé of our modern food production system. Though I’d stopped eating conventionally-raised beef in 2009, the film caused me to question much larger aspects of my consumption habits. Thanks to living in a cooperative community, I was able to share my concerns with my housemates who were graciously willing to venture to a local butcher shop and try out local grass-fed and organic meats.

Upon setting foot in the shop, I was forever dissuaded from purchasing commodity meat in a grocery store. In fact, I later interned with that very butcher shop, and was able to receive academic credit when I was hired as a part-time employee in the spring of 2011. By that time I had realized that food had become more than an academic hobby to me. I wanted to go back to my roots in sociology and thoroughly explore the Vassar curriculum to make the most of my college experience.

In reflecting on what classes I’d enjoyed the most, what topics I’d chosen for the many papers I’d written, and realizing that in the fall of my junior year I was only a few credits away from completing my psychology major, I decided to attempt to create my own major program. Through working with the professors on the Independent majors committee and diligently searching for a comprehensive curriculum that wasn’t already offered at Vassar, I created a major entitled “Food and Sustainability Studies” and declared in the fall of my junior year.

I’ve had a lot of amazing opportunities with food, Vassar, and of course food at Vassar over the past four years. This post already covers more about any senior intern at our school than you’d probably like to know, though I feel obligated to disclose that it doesn’t even begin to cover the wealth of opportunities in food, farming, activism, and psychology work that I’ve found here. In addition to the many great things I’ve already discussed, I’ve also worked on the Vassar Farm and Ecological Preserve, received academic credit for studying “The History and Culture of Tuscan Cuisine” while studying abroad in Italy, interned for the national non-profit Slow Food USA, and currently serve as the academic intern for a multidisciplinary program in food and agriculture taking place on campus this year. I promise many delicious blog posts to come!