My STEP Signature Project was a faculty-led trip to Wyatt Run Farm in Amesville, Ohio. Together with other STEP students, I learned about homesteading, environmentalism, and farming from local members of the community.
I changed my view of an ideal lifestyle. Before the STEP Trip, I believed a valuable lifestyle would be to live in a city and have all my needs provided for me. I could go to restaurants or a cafeteria, live in an apartment and be able to focus on work or spending time with friends and family. After going on the Wyatt Run Farm Trip, I see the value of self-sufficiency or “community-sufficiency.” I met people who were so dedicated to their land that they spent a lifetime building their house and gardens and ponds. I am starting to realize that the work of building your own house or making your own food could be enjoyable.
One interaction I had was meeting a couple who lived in the Wyatt Run community. They had lived there for decades and seen their land change over the years: they showed us satellite images evidencing whole forests that have grown back on the 280-acres. The couple gave us a tour of their house and their gardens. They had built their own custom outdoor canning kitchen and food storage cellar. They had installed solar panels on their roof and had their own fruit trees and chickens. They produced all the beans, tomatoes, and potatoes to last the year for themselves. It seems like so much work to produce all this food, but I got the impression they enjoyed it.
Another event which led to a change in my idea of good life was meeting a farmer who had goats, as well as a pawpaw orchard. The pawpaw is a fruit tree found in the wild in the forests of Ohio. The farmer described how he worked to find a way to commercially sell pawpaw in Ohio, working to build the infrastructure needed to freeze the fruit and worked to popularize it. He even helped start a “pawpaw festival,” which is now a cultural event including cooking competitions, live music, and local breweries. Learning about his commitment to create a new festival inspired a change in my ideas of an ideal lifestyle.
A third experience was learning some new cooking techniques, like making tortillas, fermented foods, and even hot chocolate. For the tortillas, we scraped the kernels from a special variety of corn, learned about how to soak the kernels in lime (from limestone), ground the corn to make dough, and then cooked tortillas. For the hot chocolate, we roasted chocolate beans and then peeled the skins, then we ground the beans and mixed the chocolate with hot water and coconut. The resulting drink was fattier than normal hot chocolate, due to the natural fat in cacao beans. Learning these cooking techniques made me want to become more involved in my own food that I eat every day.
The lifestyle that I will live in the future is very important to me, because I want to be able to have a varied and interesting life. At the same time, I don’t want to take advantage of other people or the earth’s natural resources. Making food and having a “do-it-yourself” attitude about life are two elements I want to bring into my life in the future. Perseverance and commitment through difficult work, two attributes I saw in many people I met, can be applied to almost any endeavor.
