Last fall, Andrea Rissing '09 was living in German House with Mallory Inman '09. It wasn't long before Rissing realized she was sharing a kitchen with an incredible cook. "She was making these things I'd never even heard of," Rissing says. "I was making peanut butter and jelly. It was pretty embarrassing."

Inman's cooking stirred something in Rissing. She started thinking about food more, looking up New York Times articles on the American food system. When she learned that some Iowa grocery stores import apples from Chile and New Zealand, it surprised her — and motivated her. The next spring, she approached Jon Andelson, Rosenfield Professor in Social Science-Anthropology and director of the Center for Prairie Studies, about doing a Mentored Advanced Project (MAP) centered on local food and women farmers.

Rissing spent this summer visiting farms around Iowa and talking to the women who run them. She met 13 different farmers, on farms ranging from 3 acres to 800. She talked to each woman for a few hours about family and farming, spirituality and gender discrimination.

The women varied vastly in their lifestyles, but Rissing found they had one thing in common. "They saw a definite connection between spirituality and the land," she says. "They ranged from conservative Christians, who saw farming as taking care of God's creation, to people who didn't have a religion, who saw the earth as a living being and life as interconnected."

She also discovered things that surprised her. "Gender isn't as determining a factor as I anticipated," she says. "It's more that people in the local food movement share the values of sustainability and a commitment to getting everyone healthy whole foods, regardless of income level."

Rissing's outlook on local food has changed a lot in the last year. She has been a vegetarian for a long time, but she didn't always consider where her food was coming from. Now she pays a regular fee to get fresh produce from a Grinnell farmer, and she visits the farmer's market every week.

"I've virtually stopped buying produce from outside the United States," she says. "It's really affected my personal values."

Taking Ethnographic Research gave her experience interviewing students — but this is a little different, she says. "Talking to students is different than talking to grown ups," she says. "They're very open and happy to have someone listen to them, but it can be intimidating sometimes, especially with the older women."

Even so, her favorite part of her MAP is the hands-on experience. Rissing travelled all over Iowa for this project. "I'm not just calling up women, I'm driving out and seeing their farm," she says. "I'm getting a much better sense of what it means to be a farming woman."

Photo courtesy of Andrea Rissing '09: Rissing and Linda Barnes, one of the several farmers Rissing interviewed for her MAP