Food and justice were on the menu at Radcliffe’s Marketplace of Ideas, as were intimate memories of family, friendship, love, and loss, some displayed for all to read.
My dear friend, Nan C. Freeman, was a martyr for the UFW [United Farm Workers]. She was killed by a truck while supporting farmworkers in Florida. When we were children, playmates with her brother and my sister, her mother would stop our play to call Nan and Nelson in for their milk, consumed between meals in their kosher home. The call to milk was the voice of love to me as a child.
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Making my first paella all by myself (or maybe with divine intervention from my Abuelita). (Spoiler alert: It was yummy!)
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Growing tomatoes on the patio — my daughter calls them garden snacks!
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My family had a farm a few miles SE of San Jose. I milked a cow for several years, fed the pigs & chickens, tended the vegetable garden. Made butter. My dad would once a year slaughter a pig—not my favorite memory.
Visitors’ handwritten memories, pinned to a clothesline, were a highlight of the Radcliffe Day event held Friday in the Sunken Garden. Nonprofits and food activist organizations offered information, buttons, and bananas. A steady crowd took leaflets and asked questions, including Radcliffe Dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Harvard President Larry Bacow, and Radcliffe Medalist Dolores Huerta, a civil rights icon and the co-founder, with Cesar Chavez, of the United Farmworkers of America.
