By Micki Manheimer and Joel Pickford

From the Authors: By the end of our first semester at Goucher, Micki and I were sick of writing. With research papers looming in all of our other classes, we were desperate to find an alternative to producing yet another paper for our Frontiers class. So we decided to join forces and create a documentary instead. I must admit, I find it slightly ironic that we’ve been selected for publication in a journal featuring other well-written papers when our original aim was to avoid the word "paper" as much as possible.

The focus of our Frontiers class was food. After reading a fair amount of literature on sustainable farming and the local food movement, and noticing the efforts Goucher College was making to provide such food for us in the dining halls, we decided to find out more about the food culture in and around our school. Of course, like any good college students, we failed to imagine the amount of work such a decision would lead to. Though Micki had some experience in video editing, neither of us had ever attempted to craft something so cohesive. Making appointments and trips to shoot were initially daunting, and intensive post-production work was strenuous given the extremely short timeframe we had to complete the project (16 days). In the end, however, our hard work paid off and we’re both quite happy with the final result. It may be rough at parts and it may have been a lot of work, but at least it’s not another paper.

From the Faculty Nominator: "Local" was created as a final project in Frontiers 100.20: Food Pleasures and Politics. This writing intensive course investigated the ways that our food choices are shaped by culture and family, corporations and advertisements, rituals and relationships. Students savored treasured memories and uncovered culinary traditions while grappling with the global economic and environmental implications of the ways that food is produced, distributed, presented and consumed. Topics included the role of tradition in our eating habits, the ethics of eating meat, the emphasis on local foods, and the experience of hunger in the United States and abroad; students experimented with a range of genres, from memoirs, recipes and restaurant reviews to analytic arguments, cross cultural interviews and a collaborative investigations. Students were invited to determine both the format and the focus of their final projects.

Watch: LOCAL (Documentary Short)

Copyrights of all Verge articles and editorial material belong to the authors.