by Lisa Burner, Associate Professor of Spanish
In late September and early October, students from ENST 200: Introduction to Environmental Arts and Humanities spent Saturday mornings clearing onion beds and harvesting peppers at Crabtree Farms and The Bethlehem Center in Chattanooga. We toured these two non-profit urban farms and learned about their commitments to food justice, local communities, education, and regenerative agriculture. Working alongside and learning from the farms’ employees Damon Bartos, Chloé Watts, and Sarah Márquez Berestecky, we had the opportunity to take part in their efforts to reimagine our local relationships to food, land, and community.
After completing our work, thanks to the generous support of the Center for Teaching, we shared a delicious meal of sandwiches, salads, and cookies from Niedlov’s, an independent bakery and café in Chattanooga that sources ingredients from local farms. Sitting around a picnic table, we reflected on our experiences, laughed, and strengthened our relationships as a class community. Refreshed, the students then took out their notebooks for some independent journaling, seeking to document in precise detail their experiences and insights from this day of community engagement. These journal entries, in turn, provided the raw material for essays that students wrote upon returning to Sewanee, in which they drew together course readings in environmental ethics, history, art, and/or literature with their embodied learning in Chattanooga.
Crabtree Farms, Sept 20, 2025
The following excerpt from Luke McLendon’s essay (double major in Environmental Arts and Humanities and Psychology) offer a glimpse into the impact of this experiential learning experience supported by the Center for Teaching and the Office of Civic Engagement:
“After hardly an hour with my hands in the soil, pulling weeds and uprooting onions overlooked in a past harvest, my head hurt; I was sweating under the southern sun directly overhead, hungry, thirsty, and itchy, as more than one fire ant had found its way under the lip of my gloves. Yet, at my core, I felt serene, gratified. At Crabtree Farms in Chattanooga, Tennessee — a land that has witnessed many tragedies in its storied history, mirroring much of the agricultural landscape in the Southeastern United States —I felt reconnected with food, even if only for a brief moment of a single day. It feels almost silly to say that such an experience — 45 total minutes of labor with a nice meal on the way and fresh, cold water readily available — could make me feel even slightly more connected to the Earth. Still, that brief intimacy with a bed of onions, shared with a group of classmates, helped my body begin to understand a notion that my mind had grasped for some time, thanks to my higher education alone: we are severely disconnected from our food. […] Our relationship to food has become one of such estrangement and isolation that a small, community-centered farm feels alien, an oddity, the likes of which I had never encountered, and it was gorgeous.”
“While working on Crabtree Farms likely triggered the release of several chemicals in my brain contributing to my serenity, from breathing fresh air to absorbing sunlight to endorphins released from squatting to the ground and pulling at tough weeds, the significance of working with a group of people toward a common, food-centered goal and subsequently eating with that same group likely are what made this trip feel so impactful. Such an experience harkens to the roots all humans have. Reconnecting my hands to the earth and toiling together with a small community with thoughts of feeding others (and thanks to the impending lunch, feeding ourselves) sparked innate feelings of a particular security and purpose that have gone almost entirely unmet during my time on earth.”
The Bethlehem Center, Oct 6, 2025
Lisa’s work was supported, in part, by a Center for Teaching Mini-Grant — learn more about how to apply here.