This break, in my warm home south of the Equator, I spent a good amount of time poolside, tanning myself rotisserie-chicken style and reading. Slightly burned out by several consecutive semesters of English study, I found myself more prone towards non-fiction texts, namely magazines. Eventually, at the insistence of various family members, I picked up the hottest book around — Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. It’s a serious hardcover book, with a somber and elegant jacket, and subtitled A Natural History of Four Meals. Inside, the author travels up and down the American food chain, back and forth across the American food landscape, and in and out of the monolithic food industry, drawing a vivid picture of what he describes as “a national eating disorder.” I tore through this book in three days. It was that good. My relationship with American food took a quick, sharp turn.

There have been books like his before — Upton Sinclair’s 1906 The Jungle is a muckraking masterpiece on Chicago’s meat-packing industry. The slightly histrionic Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser came out in 2001 to high acclaim. These books are all highly readable and have a tendency to turn the tummy. It is important to note that Sinclair, Schlosser and Pollan, in some capacity or another, are all journalists. Pollan is a professor of journalism at UC Berkeley and contributes to the New York Times, often on food. They report, tell what they have seen, and what we cannot. Pollan spends a week as a farmhand, hangs out with a corn farmer, pets his own little cow in a feedlot and gets on his hands and knees to hunt mushrooms. He brings us eye-to-eye to the possibilities of the modern human diet. The truth of what is sliding around our digestive systems. What we are being fed. Powerful stuff.

Midway through the book, I remembered that I was no stranger to getting on my hands and knees with food. Last spring, my boyfriend David and I perused endless listings of the WorldWide Organization of Organic Farmers to find a place to work over the summer in exchange for room and board. It’s been a popular (inexpensive) travel option for college students since the 1970s and a valuable resource for the ever-struggling small organic farmer. After a few e-mails, we found ourselves set for Georg Breautigam’s beautiful Binifela farm on the Spanish Island of Mallorca. We started at 8 a.m. and worked until 1 p.m., when the 100 plus degrees and blazing Mediterranean sun made it impossible to go on. As Georg was the only person on his farm, our jobs were plenty and varied. While we loved caring for the cows and chickens, most of our time was spent in the large vegetable garden.

I grew up in the city, but I come from a long line of farmers, so much of farming was familiar to me. However, as a city girl, the delicate, admittedly lazy sort that loves to sunbathe and lounge and snack, I was entirely unfamiliar with the heavy labor that farming entailed. Towards the end of the month, I developed a serious knot in my back that took me off my feet for two days. Due to stringent regulations required for organic certification, organic farming is incredibly hard work. Without pesticides, weeds take over hours after you pull them out, bugs wipe out entire crops of tomatoes overnight — a quarter-crop of potatoes can come out scrawny and fungal. Bent over pulling out a particularly nasty weed for the third time that week, David quipped that organic farming was “out-of-control-farming.”

At the end of every day, David and I would collect food for lunch. We were instructed to pick the “ugly” vegetables, those that would not sell. They had black and blue bits, were half-shriveled and had bugs crawling around them. We simply had to cut those parts off and eat the rest. Stateside, I would never, ever have touched those things.

On the farm, with a ravenous worker’s appetite, they were a delicious godsend. We learned to taste the difference between organic and industrialized. We learned what a satisfying meal a few choice vegetables, olive oil, salt and pepper can be. Prone to natural forces day after day, we felt a deep satisfaction in seeing and eating our plump fruit like never before. The memory of unwrapping and zapping of our Collegetown meals made us cringe.

Over the weeks, we talked constantly about farming and food, developing our own ideas — for example, organic is definitely better, but it’s too inefficient and only a few are willing to spend money on it. Buying local is a better bet for political and ethical wholesomeness and even saving energy, perhaps, on transport costs. In his book, Pollan covers this and more, ultimately drawing out the cold, hard fact that in today’s world, people have been distanced from the their food to the point of oblivion. Mallorca was an incredible eye-opener. Everyone should farm for a few weeks. Really.

While it’s impossible to farm as a student (well, perhaps not at Cornell), I’ve taken deliberate measures to spend more time with food. Our go-go-go society demands that our food be quick and satisfying, yet it has become incredibly over-processed and unnatural. As I commit myself to assorted Cornell responsibilities, I am also taking the time to learn to feed myself and have more control over my pantry. I do grocery shopping when I can, select my foods more carefully, cook proper meals and avoid eating alone. It’s a little old school, doesn’t earn me a good grade, but it feels really, really fantastic. Taking your food into your own hands. Powerful stuff.

Erin Geld is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. She can be contacted at esg24@cornell.edu. The Sampling appears alternate Wednesdays.