by Benjamin Bombard
The UofU’s organic garden aims to become a communtity concern.
It’s a few days after July 4, and Alexandra Parvaz, Jimmy Ruff, and a couple volunteers are harvesting veggies from their garden at the University of Utah. “The garlic harvest usually takes place on Independence Day, to declare independence from the supermarket,” Parvaz tells me. She pulls off her dirty gloves, tilts up the edge of her wide-brimmed gardener’s hat, and stands there looking at a bountiful pile of fresh-picked garlic laid out on a tarp, heads of the stuff as big as fists, with emerald stalks as long as a grown man’s arm. In this instance, gardeners aren’t simply declaring their own comestible liberty, they’re helping a whole university begin to assert its foodstuff self-sufficiency. And their efforts, combined with those of other institutional bodies, are making the local foods movement a reality at the University of Utah.