Food Irony

I’ve been holding onto these photos but now seems like a good time to document them.

At the Arabic intensive I attended this summer in California, I immediately noticed the beautiful Askadinya (I think it is called Azarole in English) trees dotting the campus. Askadinyas are all over the Eastern Mediterranean and I loved eating them in Palestine in the spring.

Fittingly there was such a tree right outside the door of the campus kitchen. And fittingly it was ignored and the fruit – ripe in June  dropped on the pavement uneaten.

Then, from my classroom (where I was learning Arabic !), I watched the beeping Sysco Truck back its way toward the kitchen door, past the Askadinya Tree, to deposit fruit like this:

A good reminder of how far we have to go in creating a local and organic food system. And university campuses in the U.S. are supposed be some of the easiest institutions to encourage such a change. But this institution is located in the Bay Area – in the heart of the food movement and where local farms grow produce year round. And the irony of studying Arabic while fruit common in the Arab world is ignored was almost comical. Everyday I asked myself ‘Wyn Michael Pollen ?”  = “Where is Michael Pollen ?”