Common App Essay Anonymous

I felt an unequivocal sense of community when I gazed at my dinner plate one night at Chewonki and acknowledged that the beets, potatoes, and lettuce on my plate were plucked from the earth by me and my best friends. The hours that we expended on the farm were not comprised solely of plowing our shovels into the earth, planting lettuce seeds into rows of soil, or running from the menacing chickens that traced our every step. These hours were also spent learning about Karl’s home school, establishing which color yarn to purchase for the next hat we would knit, or speculating what we would have for dinner that night. Each bite I took, there was love. There was a memory. There was a sense of community.

One autumn day after harvesting, my class discovered that a group of us would be taking heaps of our fresh produce to a local church that, on a weekly basis, set up a food pantry to provide free organic produce to local families that face food insecurity. Though I had donated cans for canned-food drives at my school before, I never had the opportunity to see and to meet those receiving the food. I wanted to witness the full cycle: from earth to hands to plate. After strategically fitting different-sized crates full of tomatoes,...