Final-year students on the three-year undergraduate degree course are flying to Canada, the United States, Japan, Argentina, Mexico and, for the first time, Israel. Here’s a foretaste of where they’ll be going and what they’ll be seeing on the seven study trips.
United States
The trip to the state of Arizona, organized in collaboration with former Master student Kimberly Robinson will focus on human adaptation to this vast desert frontier land, and on its melting pot of Anglo-Americans, Mexicans and indigenous peoples. The students will visit communities that have harnessed social and architectural projects into the development of sustainable agriculture. Lunches, dinners and cookery lessons will give them an idea of the state’s fusion gastronomy. On their tour of the Grand Canyon, the party will come to realize the importance of the River Colorado, which supplies water to five America states and northern Mexico, generating spin-off activities that provide jobs for 250,000 people.
Another group of students will don their most comfortable sneakers to explore the different communities of the Big Apple. The first appointment on their agenda will be with Monica Fantauzzi, a student at Brooklyn College, who will take them on a tour of East Harlem, the heart of immigration from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. Monica’s fellow student Kristina Liu will then guide them round Flushing, the Chinatown of Queens. The next ports of call will be Little Italy and the Italo-American market on Arthur’s Avenue in the Bronx. The visits to the UNO and UNICEF headquarters, where expert Daniela Martini will talk about food risk, farming and education, will be more institutional in tone. Annie Hauck Lawson, coeditor of the book Gastropolis, will present the “Compost with Brooklyn Mompost” project to the students, who will then tour the Hunt’s Point fish, meat and fruit and vegetable markets with “Metropolitanwalk” guide Andrew Smith and Union Square Green Market with David Hughes and Jamie Gaehring of “GrowNYC”.
Canada
The party bound for Vancouver will find out more about the city’s food policies through meetings with producers and restaurateurs and by attending the Vancouver Urban Farming Forum. The places they will visit will include the Greater Vancouver Food Bank Society’s Choice Kitchens, the Sharing Farm, Granville Island Market and Matchstick Coffee Roasters. Bob Sun, finally, will take them on a tour of Chinatown.
Japan
A packed program will take students to the Kansai region on a journey of two stages, the first from Osaka to Kobe, the second from Iga to Otsu. The program envisages visits to school and hospital cafeterias, meetings with sake producers, Omi cattle breeders and shijimi shell fishers, and stop-offs at companies that process konbu algae and rice vinegar, not to mention a water distribution and purification plant. The students will stay at the historic Ritsumeikan University’s Biwako Kusatsu campus in Kyoto.
Argentina and Mexico
In Argentina, the UNISG party will tour the province of Buenos Aires, meeting journalist Soledad Barutti, author of Malcomidos, in which she criticizes the industrial production methods that are affecting food in the country; Diego Felix, creator of “Colectivo Felix”, an example of young, sustainable, mobile cooking in the city itself; and Angi Ferrazzini, one of the founders of the “Sabe la Terra” earth market in the suburb of Tigre. The students will also visit the Anna Park family farm, which produces organic yerba mate, and Ferias Francas farmers’ markets.
The Mexican party will explore traditionally cultivated and irrigated agrosystems, attend lectures on the local gastronomy, meet some of the new stars of Mexican haute cuisine and visit the pre-Colombian ruins at Teotihuacan. They will also be taken round amaranth plantations by members of a producers’ community, who will explain recovery and cultivation techniques, highlighting the nutritional value of the leaves and the grains of the plant.
Israel
First stop on the trip to Israel, a new destination for the UNISG, will be La Terra Promessa, Sandro and Irit Pellegrini’s winery in Kibbutz Gat. The students will then spend two days in the Negev desert region, where they will visit the Kornmehl Farm dairy. After traveling to Jerusalem, following a stopover on the Dead Sea, they will meet chef Moshe Basson. In the Judaean hills they will visit: the Kaima organic farm specialized in social rehabilitation schemes for deprived young people, at Moshav Beit Zait, the Sataf nature reserve and Shai Selzer’s craft dairy. The third part of the trip will take in the northern region of Upper Galilee and will come to an end in Tel Aviv.