Last Friday a member of the National Bitter Melon Council presented to a small group of community builders in Lower Town St. Paul. Founded on the principles of Community, Commodity, Cultivation and Creativity. The National Bitter Melon Council is an art-making, community building and vegetable advocacy group.
Andi Sutton, Director of Public Relations for the Council, shared stories of past community projects and invited the group to share thoughts on how the council could work locally.
One of the interesting and possibly a mid-western regional marker was the local group conscience resistance to bitter. We were invited to share a recent experience with bitter and a few people sighted the recent (or never-ending) snow this winter, some shared feelings toward local and global political unrest, a few shared experiences with bitter flavored food, but the majority of the group expressed active resistance to bitter; as in “I just don’t do bitter”.
As someone who made a new year’s resolution to be more compassionate, I understand the sentiment of removing bitter from ones emotional vocabulary (Understand, but still bitter over being stuck in my alley for hours digging out of the recent snow).
Andi challenged the group to embrace bitter as a useful yin to the yang of sweeter more culturally and socially accepted emotions.
Embracing the ugly, bitter, and to many people foreign, bitter melon as their literal mascot, the National Council seeks to eliminate discrimination’s of aesthetic judgment.
By bringing together community farmers and consumers, artists and patrons, young and old, and even visitors to the community in a shared experience—growing bitter melons, building community gardens and art. The council builds community. A shared development of moment-to-moment learning of individuals in their own particular contexts to build on their cultural backgrounds—heavy stuff of a little green melon that looks like an “ugly pickle”. But why not?
The National Bitter Melon Council also trades in the commodity of meaning or semiotics. The Council itself is the manufacture of new semiotic currency through the mining of existing social structure models and embedded community value. Their mission is to expand the capacity of social structures to have new, reclaimed, unanticipated, surprising, and serendipitous semiotic value.
The Council has worked on community art and garden projects in Boston and Los Angeles and brings people together in community to explore the basis of community by looking at art, food, neighborhood and culture through the lens of the bitter melon. I look forward to the next steps the Bitter Melon Council takes in our community and invite you to check out their website at http://bittermelon.org/.
