Food has always been a deeply meaningful and important part of my life — not only is it a basic right to have access to healthful food, but rituals of preparing and sharing meals have marked important milestones in my life and played a big part in how my family relates to one another. This summer, I had plans to work as a Harward Summer Civic Fellow with the St. Mary’s Nutrition Center, helping them run their youth cooking programs. The Nutrition Center is a food justice organization that serves the Lewiston/Auburn community through their food pantry, community gardens, and children and youth gardening and cooking education programs. While my pre-COVID-19 plans of a full-time position with the cooking programs obviously did not come to fruition — all in-person programming was cancelled for the summer — the fellowship transformed into something entirely different. This ended up being a welcome change. Although I was only able to work full-time on Wednesdays and Thursdays, I got the opportunity to work on a variety of different tasks that gave me a broader understanding of how a food security and justice organization functions. In a time of increased financial insecurity, contagious – and at times life-threatening – illness, and general heightened community anxiety, the Nutrition Center’s services have never been more essential. It was really rewarding to be a part of the organization’s adaptation strategy in the face of the pandemic.

Wednesday mornings were typically fast-paced. I worked with a team of four individuals, packing and loading up almost 500 bags of food to be delivered via volunteer drivers to individuals and families who were not able to leave their homes for whatever reason. This was a new service the Nutrition Center initiated in response to the pandemic in the spring, and was vital to providing access to food to those community members who were immunocompromised, in quarantine, or unable to come in on open pantry days. On Wednesday afternoons, I worked a two-hour shift on the Good Food Bus, a moving mobile market that brings and sells produce from local farms to food-insecure neighborhoods in Lewiston, and for the rest of the day I worked in the community gardens or helped create toolkits for at-home children’s programs involving food-based or garden education.

My Thursdays were spent almost entirely working in the community and educational gardens. I planted, weeded, maintained, and watered different plots throughout Lewiston-Auburn regularly. The bulk of my work was in the gardens that would have normally been used to grow food for cooking or children’s programs, as these gardens needed to be maintained through the summer regardless of the pandemic. This was extremely rewarding — planting at the start of the summer and harvesting toward the end, offering harvested raspberries to children running around at the Hillview children’s garden, harvesting hundreds of garlic plants to be dried and sold on the Good Food Bus — the whole arc of growing and providing food was not only an extremely valuable learning experience for me, but it reminded me of the ritual-based relationship with food that got me excited about this kind of work in the first place. The gratitude I felt toward the plants I got to grow and work with affirmed my interest in ecology-based social justice work. Everyone should have access to food, undoubtedly, but everyone should also have access to opportunities to facilitate their own connections to land.

While I do think my work for the Nutrition Center was supportive for them, particularly in their process of adapting to COVID-19, I definitely feel that this was far more of a learning experience than a service experience for me. I feel very fortunate to have worked with staff members at the Nutrition Center who have worked for years to bring both healthy food and the capacity to grow healthy food to the L/A community. The knowledge and experience of my supervisors has been invaluable to me as I seek to dive into this kind of work post-grad. I am looking forward to continuing my relationship with the Nutrition Center into this school year and am very grateful to have received the Harward Summer Civic Fellowship to do this important work.

– Anna Maheu ’21