"Cela est bien dit, répondit Candide, mais il faut cultiver notre jardin."
Dear both of our readers,
Now that you are enlightened but also likely exhausted by my penetratingly French quotation and by Leo "Smokey-the-bear" Schwartz's comprehensive description of the Politics of Wildfires (to be published in a three volume set by the Harvard University Press), I will actually take a break from my usual tone of complaint to celebrate, for a brief moment, the quiet pleasure of farm life.
After one post, I was a blogger, so I guess one day of work makes me a farmer.
Deep in the deciduous forests of Denmark, about a half-hour from Copenhagen by train, sits quiet Stengården, an organic farm that cultivates vegetables, egg-laying hens, cattle for slaughter, and friendly, socialist virtues. The farm is absolutely stunning, and the family that runs it has that standard Scandinavian awkward kindness which I've always tried to simulate but have only ever achieved the awkward part. We work five hours a day, five days a week in exchange for room and board.
Room: all of the unpaid workers or "WWOOFers" (you may know them by their historical name, "slaves"), share a gorgeous apartment with tons of light that pours in from huge skylights. Beautiful common room, scandinavian design, etc. If this apartment were in Manhattan, Anderson Cooper would scrimp and save to cough up the down payment. And it has a fucking washing machine!
But really the board is what has made this so cool. Stengården has the largest organic supermarket in Denmark (and the owners joke the most expensive, too), and we are free to waltz in at will and take anything, save alcohol of course. Every time I get groceries I feel kind of like a criminal. For breakfast we can have yogurt, muesli, eggs, avocado, etc. Then we work for two hours until "coffee break," when we are given lekker breads, cheeses, juices, etc. Then we work for another couple of hours and it's lunchtime: meats, herring, vegetables, potatoes, you get it. By this time it is 1 P.M. and we have the rest of the day off to grab whatever we can from the shop with whatever of our hands hasn't been thistled and nettled away from weeding.
It's not all a walk in the park, though. Some of the "trendy" flavors are a little unorthodox by American standards:
Call me old-fashioned, but the thought of chomping on my own offspring doesn't appeal to me; I'm not a goddamned beta fish. But I guess "when in Rome..."
More later--have to go for a leisurely stroll.
xoxo, gossip girl
Dear both of our readers,
Now that you are enlightened but also likely exhausted by my penetratingly French quotation and by Leo "Smokey-the-bear" Schwartz's comprehensive description of the Politics of Wildfires (to be published in a three volume set by the Harvard University Press), I will actually take a break from my usual tone of complaint to celebrate, for a brief moment, the quiet pleasure of farm life.
After one post, I was a blogger, so I guess one day of work makes me a farmer.
Deep in the deciduous forests of Denmark, about a half-hour from Copenhagen by train, sits quiet Stengården, an organic farm that cultivates vegetables, egg-laying hens, cattle for slaughter, and friendly, socialist virtues. The farm is absolutely stunning, and the family that runs it has that standard Scandinavian awkward kindness which I've always tried to simulate but have only ever achieved the awkward part. We work five hours a day, five days a week in exchange for room and board.
Room: all of the unpaid workers or "WWOOFers" (you may know them by their historical name, "slaves"), share a gorgeous apartment with tons of light that pours in from huge skylights. Beautiful common room, scandinavian design, etc. If this apartment were in Manhattan, Anderson Cooper would scrimp and save to cough up the down payment. And it has a fucking washing machine!
But really the board is what has made this so cool. Stengården has the largest organic supermarket in Denmark (and the owners joke the most expensive, too), and we are free to waltz in at will and take anything, save alcohol of course. Every time I get groceries I feel kind of like a criminal. For breakfast we can have yogurt, muesli, eggs, avocado, etc. Then we work for two hours until "coffee break," when we are given lekker breads, cheeses, juices, etc. Then we work for another couple of hours and it's lunchtime: meats, herring, vegetables, potatoes, you get it. By this time it is 1 P.M. and we have the rest of the day off to grab whatever we can from the shop with whatever of our hands hasn't been thistled and nettled away from weeding.
It's not all a walk in the park, though. Some of the "trendy" flavors are a little unorthodox by American standards:
Call me old-fashioned, but the thought of chomping on my own offspring doesn't appeal to me; I'm not a goddamned beta fish. But I guess "when in Rome..."
More later--have to go for a leisurely stroll.
xoxo, gossip girl
No comments:
Post a Comment