Connecting to the Source Through Food at Adamah Farm
At Adamah Farm in northwest Connecticut, we grow organic vegetables, fruit, nuts, berries, beans, and mushrooms – everything that health and climate experts (not to mention our local bees, birds and fish) tell us should make up a conscientious diet.
We turn food scraps from the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center where we are located into life-giving compost fertilizer; cultivate flowers beloved by insects that are beneficial to our crops and the ecosystem; and plant trees that capture carbon and store it in the ground while holding precious soil in place with their roots. At this time of year, we intercept sweet sap flowing up and down the awakening trunks of maple trees and boil it down at a ratio of 40:1 to make syrup.
Our interconnectedness with other species is abundantly clear when you are plucking a fresh berry off the vine with a bee nestling into an adjacent flower or while digging a potato out of loose dirt under the flapping wings of a red-tailed hawk. The imperative to be thoughtful in those relationships through food becomes unavoidable. Join us to experience such clarity for yourself at an Isabella Freedman retreat, or, depending on your stage of life, for the residential young adult Adamah Fellowship program or a week at the Teva Learning Center for Jewish Day schools.
Of course, you don’t have to schlep far to see plainly your connection to the more-than-human world, to have the experience of having your sight restored, as it says in the morning shacharit liturgy, poke’ach ivrim. You can notice our entwinedness in the opening leaf buds of the tree on your block the first day you wear a t-shirt outside, or in the smell of rosemary wafting from a lichen-covered planter in front of a city building, and you can let it inspire you to choose to connect with the wider world through every bite.
By: Janna Siller, Farm Director and Advocacy Coordinator at Adamah Farm