Making meaning: Writing is relevant

Understanding writing in context and what we do with it led Matthews beyond the classroom and toward students facing food insecurity. Beet the System, the cooking program she created, brought together its own community in the winter of 2024. The initiative, she says, was a tribute to the moment when writing meets passion in its tangible form.

Raised off the coast of Virginia on Chincoteague Island, Matthews learned the importance of community and how it is linked to the food we share. As a first-year student in professor Su Yin Khor’s Food and Identity: Multimodality in Composition course, she took the concepts of writing within a context and applied them to make meaningful change within the COA community.

Beet the System was a product of perfect timing. While Matthews was enrolled in the first-year Human Ecology Core Course, professor emeritus Davis Taylor inspired a conversation that shed light on the food insecurity problems throughout campus during the weekends when the dining hall is closed. Given this context and the newly acquired skills from Khor’s class, Matthews set to work creating the program and a blog to accompany it. This work, she says, directly links the multiple fields in which writing is applicable and relevant, making it a prime example of human ecology in action.

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In the fall here at COA, I arrived quickly. Speeches were given, friendships initiated, dry bags were stuffed and unstuffed as trips began and ended, and courses were chosen. I found myself among an incredibly diverse and intriguing piece of people who had somehow all agreed to meet at 10:35 in the library seminar room. We were meeting in terms of something vulnerable, introspective, and ubiquitous: writing. Something some of us had loathed and avoided for years. This class was not the average Freshman Composition or ENG 101, however. It was a typical COA course that allowed us to explore the interconnectedness between seemingly distinct parts of life. This course in particular focused on food, identity, and how that can be expressed and reflected through writing.

As part of our work, we were asked to complete a genre analysis as one of our major projects—a critical step in developing rhetorical awareness as new college students and lifelong learners. We had the flexibility to choose our own genres, so I chose to analyze food blogs centered around zero-waste. As someone who grew up finding ways to be creative in the kitchen out of both necessity and what later also became a source of inspiration, I was curious what other people had discovered and documented. Blogs had always been of interest to me; I enjoyed the storyline, the history, and the digital keepsake of what could have been from someone’s old wooden family recipe box. All of this thought given to cooking, the deep and introspective conversations around identity, and the cultural education I received from my classmates had me thinking a lot about home.

Chincoteague Island stretches thin and long, just like its people with their accents thick as palm leaves. We grew up strumming old guitars and shuffling coffee-stained playing cards. I was raised by cowrie shells, sand dollars, and by the heavy conchs I raised to my ears. By the afternoons spent, feet dangling off the dock, pulling up hefty blue crabs who tugged at our ropes of twine. They would shuffle and shimmy along the dock, sideways, until someone more qualified than my brother and I could decide if they were sizable enough to keep.

It was a beautiful place that makes for a beautiful life, but also one as uncertain as the tango between piping plovers and crashing waves. I can speak for more than myself when I say that the days were long, the sun was hot, and the wind was strong. However, with a community so small and a trade so niche, we always found ourselves connecting over the food we caught. Aluminum food trays were spread along kitchen counters and stovetops. Even expanding out into the laundry room were trays of clam cakes on top of the washer and dryer. It was August; the harvest was abundant. The season would soon diminish into winter, when the water would threaten to freeze over. It had been five years since I had been back to the island, but sitting in the seminar room reading the stickers on my classmate’s computer, listening to the osprey calls in between readings, and with Su Yin satisfying my endless stream of questions, I felt as if I were back again.

As the term at COA progressed, I finished my genre research, cooked some new recipes, and learned a ton about writing, all while taking part in the Human Ecology Core Course. In one of the sections of the course, we met with Davis Taylor, a now-retired economist with a background in food systems. In passing, he had mentioned that food insecurity on campus during the weekends was a pressing matter. Since TAB, the COA dining hall, closes from Friday night to Monday morning, a lot of students find themselves at a loss for what to do on the weekends. It bothered me that people were going hungry. It made me think of my island past September. It was then that the tourists were gone, and everything but the Dollar General was closed. People were poor and hungry. The sun wasn’t around to encourage us island kids to pile ourselves onto one bike and ride to the south end for endless hours of hide and seek. It was dark and cold and poverty puts people in a type of paralysis that only the strength of community can undo. I understood the strength of community at COA. It didn’t seem existential or “life changing, world changing,” but I knew I needed to start thinking about how to address the food insecurity issue on campus.

There were multiple factors at play. The price of groceries is one, knowing what to do with those groceries is another, having an accessible and clean kitchen is essential, and community is what makes it all feel worth the effort. There are already some programs on campus working to feed people on the weekends—the community fridge and Sunday night dinners are things I find myself and others grateful for often. I wanted to focus on educating people, which seemed to be the only missing piece. Knowing how to cook and feeling comfortable in the kitchen is a crucial life skill. I knew that not everyone may have had the opportunities to learn before. Taking into account my background helping out with our family businesses—the hours I spent as a kid washing dishes, chopping parsley, restocking ice, and running food—, I considered myself qualified enough to at least offer a tip here and there. Zero-waste is also a factor of cooking that is essential to pass on. Not only is it environmentally conscious to save food, but it also helps with overall costs and quantity. I thought, if I had the means to make even a small difference, then why not?

Meetings with food systems professor Kourtney Collum accompanied with notes scribbled in blue pen, long phone calls, and a winter break later, Beet the System was born. The name is a tribute to the catchy phrase we all know and love, but is also a tribute to pushing past the systems that aim to keep us stuck in stagnant places—the systems of things like economics, politics, or social class. My friends and I started getting excited about Saturdays at 5 p.m. in the Davis Kitchen. It started with maybe five of us, and a few weeks later, it doubled! We decided to cap the group to eight ecologically keen culinary apprentices. All the while, the blog I had been writing for my Food and Identity class was to be the central, accessible space for the COA community to access the recipes.

The blog includes the recipes we cook together during the program, recipes I made for class in the fall, and some of my favorite dishes from home. The blog is sent out to the community via email every now and then as recipes are added, with careful intention to send it closer to Thursday or Friday as the weekend approaches. This gives people room to meal prep and grocery shop before the long weekend. During my class in the fall where the blog was started, I learned about the core and negotiable conventions of genres by observation and application; we spent a lot of time in class doing gene research, which prepared me to build my own blog by observing what I noticed in other ones. There are certain necessary pieces, like a title, pictures, ingredients, and directions. Some blogs add other parts, like social media links and videos. Things like the colors, fonts, and word choice all contribute to the overall aesthetic, or vibe. These are all important factors I considered when building the blog; I wanted it to feel very grassroots and earthy while maintaining a sweet sense of community. All of this was to be balanced by an appealing, clean, professional feeling. I chose to add pictures that were informative about the steps, which are also described in detailed captions, as well as pictures that simply lent themselves to the feelings of comfort and inspiration I am aiming to create for readers.

As for the cooking classes themselves, usually there are three parts: a main course, a side dish, and a dessert. This gives people the ability to choose which course they would like to work on. Maybe one week they try their hand at a main dish and then another week they give a go at baking a dessert. At most, there are two people working on the same thing. Ideally, if eight people come, there are two people to wash dishes, help with chopping, make sure recycling and compost are taken care of, and play some fun music! At the beginning of the night, everyone decides on their role and then we begin following the printed recipes set out beforehand. The cooking usually takes around an hour to an hour and a half. Afterwards, we clean the kitchen and circle around a table to enjoy what we prepared together in good company. After leftovers are allocated for the community fridge and anyone else who would like any, we part ways with lots of love and agree to meet again soon. The night usually ends with a text from my friend Everett with a link to something like Green Beans In Red Pepper Sauce or Sesame Soba Noodles. I smile thinking of people anticipating the next workshop.

Not only do I hope to tell a story of something meaningful to me, but I also find it crucial to make a point about writing. Beet the System was born out of my writing class during the fall and then actualized by the circumstances on campus, brought to my attention during the Core Course. As part of the work I get to do with the Writing Program, we emphasize that writing is not a decontextualized activity. It is a part of everything that we do and Beet the System is just an example of how writing done in class can come alive. It can facilitate things that are very relevant and meaningful in our lives. These writing assignments are not just for class; they have the potential to create change in communities large and small. Whether it’s a genre analysis, a research paper, an infographic, or a lab report, everything has the potential to inspire meaning. At COA, we have the gift of an interdisciplinary approach; I challenge you to think about how your writing can span curriculum, contexts, and discourse communities. Most importantly, let it mean something to you. Bring it back to the passion you have for a place or its people, just as I keep returning back to my tiny island, like the blue crabs would return every summer to our weathered ropes of twine.