Will We Get to See Some of These Seeds Take Root? The Value of Your Curiosity

Some ideas are like seeds. Some seeds are lovingly planted in well-tended gardens and others scattered in the wind. In either case, it’s not always clear which seeds, not unlike ideas, will take root and become something more. Something that might start as a tangent in a classroom discussion might bloom into a project or action, and perhaps that is where it remains. Or perhaps it might grow into something much bigger than initially imagined.

In this moment, in these complicated times, I am thinking about my own time in the classroom as a student. For me, in this memory, I am recalling taking a graduate urban planning class where I learned about urban infrastructure, among other things. As someone who thinks quite a bit about food and the environment, it struck me as odd how absent food was from this discourse and theory—something, if we are fortunate, that is a fundamental and hopefully joyful part of our everyday life. I could certainly see how water, sewage, electrical, and roads must be considered in the development and maintenance of a community, yet I wondered about where food fit it. More wondering, and many conversations later, I began to see food as infrastructure and wanted to explore the ways in which this could be drawn out so others might see this too.

But this is a Letter on Pragmatic Hope, and at this point one might reasonably ask what this typical example of academic curiosity has to do with pragmatic hope. Hope is much needed in these difficult times. Amongst the many challenges we face, the food system is often an afterthought. Yet, I keep thinking about it. More thinking, more conversations, more studying, which in a couple of years led to a paper co-authored with a dear colleague and fellow food systems scholar, set to wondering what it would be like to see food as infrastructure and daring to suggest that government could take a role in realizing food as infrastructure through developing public grocery stores.

Fast forward nearly a decade, the years moving on finding new interests, and many more conversations and wonderings, leaving the notion of public groceries tucked away as a line on my CV, and an occasional reference nested in broader explorations of the ways in which we might imagine transforming urban environments and food systems to be more just and create more access for all. Then, from seemingly out of the blue, comes an email from Food Tank, a place where food systems thought leaders gather to explore and push for change, asking about this paper in the context of a little known (at the time) mayoral hopeful in my former hometown of New York City, raising the notion of public run grocery stores as means to address the crisis of affordability, and food insecurity faced by 1.4 million New Yorkers. Much skepticism emerges throughout Zohran Mamdani’s campaign, across many aspects of his affordability platform, and more media explores the question of the viability of such a seemingly simplistic yet unlikely concept. Could it ever happen?

Fast forward some months later, and to my delight I begin receiving notes, that in fact plans for the first city-owned grocery store are coming together and will be opened in East Harlem. So, this letter of hope seeks to ground you in the value of your curiosity. To let your ideas take form and give them air and water and whatever else they might need to develop. We are so fortunate to take our place in these fertile spaces of academic and intellectual investigation. To follow our ideas and see how they can be seeds planted in a garden or spread in the wind. If we wait long enough, and pay attention, we may get to see some of these seeds take root.

Christine Caruso is Assistant Professor of the Practice in the Bailey College of the Environment and can be reached at ccaruso@wesleyan.edu.