2023 Writer's Salon Workshops Series

Food is never just food. It is part of the political, social, physical, and psychological process of explaining culture, society, and systems of power and oppression. Our food system encompasses everything from the farm to table, and even food waste. With this workshop I want to start conversations to define food itself, its power, and the many meanings it has across gender, race, generations, borders and much more. We all experience and interact with our local, state and regional food systems in different ways and at different levels every single day. As food systems practitioners, farmers, advocates, and eaters, how we interact with food systems tells stories of privilege, oppression, comfort, struggle, passion, and sadness. This is an ongoing workshop, online conversation and toolkit that invites you to use writing and introspection to tell your food systems story.  ​  In this workshop participants identify tools to reclaim, write, document and showcase how they experience their food system and how it shapes them.

Vanessa Garcia Polanco co-designs the strategy and implementation of Young Farmers’ policy campaigns, ensuring equity-driven, farmer-centric research, policy, and programmatic interventions for a more just food system. She serves as the organizational council member and co-chair of the Farming Opportunities & Fair Competition Committee of the US National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. She has previously worked with the US Department of Agriculture, and the Michigan State University Center for Regional Food Systems.  She is a member of the United Nations YOUNGO Agriculture Working Group and was part of 2021 New York Times Generation Climate at the UN Conference of the Parties Climate Hub.  She is the first Dominican woman to serve the presidential appointment in the Rhode Island USDA Farm Service Agency State Committee where she champions cultural competency and equity in USDA programmatic operations for RI farmers of color and young farmers. She is an alumna of Michigan State University and the University of Rhode Island.  She is a James Beard Foundation Scholar, an Agriculture, Food, Human Values Society Innovation Leader, a 2021 Emerging Leader in Food and Ag, a 2022 Union of Concerned Scientist Science Defender and a 2021 and 2022 Grist Fixer Finalist.