Students, Meet Durham
First-year students visit farms, restaurants and ride bikes in tours of Durham and the surrounding community
Wednesday, August 30, 2006
Eliza MacLean raises happy hogs.
They snort and snuffle, roll in mud, devour the remains of her watermelon patch and generally live the lives that pigs are supposed to live.
Associate Professor Kathy Rudy wants new Duke students to meet MacLean and her pigs. She thinks the students can learn a lot from them: about animals, about farming and about Durham — the place where the students will live for the next four years.
On Sept. 23, Rudy plans to take about 60 students to visit MacLean’s Cane Creek Farm as part of an orientation program called Into the City, which aims to introduce first-year students to Durham and its surroundings. Rudy and other Duke faculty and staff are leading 10 tours in and around Durham.
“Duke is very lucky to be situated in a city like this, and it’s important for us that our students are aware of the opportunities they’re going to have,” says Clay Adams, coordinator of parent and family programs in student affairs, which organized the program. “There really is something for everyone.”
Other jaunts include a walking tour of Durham’s Civil Rights heritage, a visit to one faculty member’s favorite restaurants and a bike ride on the American Tobacco Trail. As many as 700 of Duke’s 1,687-member class of 2010 are expected to take part in the program, which began on Aug. 26 with talks by Duke President Richard H. Brodhead and Durham Mayor Bill Bell and service projects throughout Durham.
Like many of the faculty and staff leading the tours, Rudy’s choice blends her personal and professional interests. An associate professor of women’s studies, she has been involved for several years in a beagle rescue organization and the Animal Protection Society of Durham shelter. Her work with those groups raised her scholarly interest in ethical issues of how animals are treated. She asked herself: What about the meat I’m eating? How did those animals live?
Rudy wants the students to consider these issues when they tour Cane Creek Farm, where MacLean — who has a master’s degree from Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences — runs a sustainable, family farm. Her 11-acre spread is near Mebane about 25 miles west of the Duke campus. After the tour, the group will have a meal from one of MacLean’s hogs.
“I didn’t want to go vegetarian — I love meat — but I wanted to find meat where the animals had not been tortured,” Rudy says.
After a presentation on the factory farms that proliferate in Eastern North Carolina, students on Rudy’s tour will head out to Cane Creek. Instead of the metal crates and concrete floors of the large-scale hog farms, they’ll see the critters on MacLean’s 11-acre farm living in pastures and pens. Pigs with names like Lucille and Miss Piggy root around, digging up grubs and eating grass as the baby pigs squeal and fight for a spot at the sows’ teats.
It looks like a child’s vision of a farm: Roosters crow and young chickens scatter as a big, black dog runs among them. Baby pigs race around on stiff little legs. Donkeys, goats and ducks intermingle with each other.
“Everyone on my farm has to get along,” MacLean says.
MacLean sells her pork, vegetables and watermelons at the Carrboro Farmer’s Market and also supplies local chefs, who value the meat from the rare Ossabaw breed she raises. Although the pigs aren’t ideal for turning a profit — they’re small, aggressive and slow-growing — the meat is unsurpassed in flavor. Martha Stewart has tried it; chef Alice Waters has visited the farm. Meat from MacLean’s pigs is served at many of Durham’s top restaurants, including the cafe at the Nasher Museum of Art.
The pigs are given no antibiotics, hormones or animal protein, and McLean uses them to full advantage of the farm. She turns them loose in the vegetable patch after the season is over, and they eat up the remaining plants, fertilize with their manure and till the ground with their digging.
“The idea is to figure out how to make it all work together and to use the land without hurting it,” MacLean says. “I want a product that’s good for the animal, good for the land and good for people.”
The farm visit isn’t the only Into the City tour that actually takes students out of the city: Julie Reynolds, Mellon instructor of writing and biology, will take 23 students on a canoe trip on the Eno River. Reynolds wants them to see the invasive species of plants along the river, observe the biodiversity and become acquainted with the Eno River State Park.
“What I’m hoping to point out to them is to have an awareness of their surroundings,” Reynolds says. “My goal is to show students this resource that’s so close to campus. My impression is that students don’t know about it.”
Like Reynolds, Rudy hopes the students come away from the tour better informed about their new home.
“I would like the students to be aware that they’re moving to the most progressive pocket of the state when it comes to agricultural, environmental and animal compassion issues,” Rudy says. “There are lots of reasons why the Triangle is a cool place to live and this is one of them.”