by Ellie Roscher
Two young fish swimming along meet an older fish swimming the other way. The older fish nods at them and says, “Morning, how’s the water?” The two young fish swim on, and then one of them looks at the other and asks, “What is water?”
Christina Gutierrez recognizes the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the water we drink are too essential to life to take for granted. She knows that choices she makes affect the food, water, and the environment that keep us alive and well.
Food enamored Christina as an energetic and happy kid. “I loved preparing and eating salads with backyard garden vegetables,” she remembers. “In the first grade, I started checking cookbooks out of the library and fell asleep reading them every night in bed. For birthdays, I asked for kitchen gadgets like chefs’ knives and a crème brûlée torch.”
While her friends were watching SpongeBob, Christina watched Jamie Oliver and Two Fat Ladies on the BBC. She preferred cooking and baking banana walnut bread to playing sports.
“By the time I was 12, I had lived in Peru, Chile, and Italy because of my mom’s work,” she says. “That deepened my love of food, language, and culture. I saw how people in other countries make different decisions about food and lifestyle. This helped me make my decisions more intentional.”
One day when she was little, Christina saw her uncle pick up trash off the street. She didn’t understand why he went out of his way to pick up a piece of someone else’s trash.
“If I don’t, who will?” he told her. “If no one cleans up, the world will be a mess. I have to try to make a difference, even if it seems insignificant.”
Her uncle’s words changed Christina’s mindset. She started thinking about the impact she made on the environment. “Everything I do has an effect on this earth, whether for better or for worse.”
Christina started thinking about the ethics of water. She learned about the privatization of water in documentaries such as Blue and Gold. The film challenged her to consider the drinks she was choosing to consume.
“Buying a $3 bottle of water for convenience sake can be taking away clean water from someone else who doesn’t have access while my tap water is clean,” Christina says.
By the time Christina entered high school, she had already done a fair share of thinking and studying about food, water, and the environment. No longer wanting to work alone, she started a Green Team at her school. A small group of committed students made action plans to raise awareness about being green.
The Green Team sold reusable water bottles with the school logo on them to cut down on the purchase of bottled water. They made and distributed reusable lunch bags out of free scraps from the fabric store to cut down on disposable paper bags. They partnered with two teachers who were master gardeners to build a rain garden and a vegetable garden on school grounds.
Bike-to-school days became popular for students who lived close. The team raised money for solar panels and brought in speakers on Earth Day to continue to educate the student body.
In her four years, the Green Team grew under Christina’s leadership. Students shared ideas about how to alter personal habits to support the environment while working on school-wide policy changes.
As a student at Notre Dame, Christina spent a summer in Costa Rica. She connected with an association of organic farmers, ASOPROLA (Asociación de Productores La Amistad) and worked, ate, lived, and learned on organic farms. She helped prepare the soil for seedlings and assisted with watering. The farm had only a hose for watering, however.
“I had to water every tomato, cilantro, cucumber, bean, spinach and pepper plant separately,” she reports. “As tedious as it sounds, I love being close to vegetables growing and having time to think.”
The farm has 14 beehives that house around 40,000 bees. Besides watering, Christina tended to the bees, cut down bananas to sell, and planted coffee. Christina enjoyed, maybe most of all, eating food right off the land she tended during the day.
At the end of the summer, Christina traveled from the farm to EARTH University in San Jose. EARTH University is a carbon-neutral campus that accepts students from over 25 countries. The campus produces almost all the food in the cafeteria, including the meats and dairy.
The bathroom near the cafeteria collects human waste, processes it, and takes it to a generator to provide energy to the cafeteria to cook the food. Food waste left over on cafeteria plates goes to feed the pigs. The pigs’ waste is made into biofuel to power the lights.
Lettuce and herbs grow in beds along the buildings. Students use pineapple rinds donated from a pineapple juice company to make natural gas. This creativity raised Christina’s awareness of what was possible to a whole new level.
In Costa Rica, Christina noticed that her work around food, water, and the environment builds community. One hostel where she stayed listed the following community rules: “Turn off your TV. Leave your house. Know your neighbors. Look up when you are walking. Plant flowers. Greet people. Help a lost dog. Pick up litter. Bake extra and share. Share your skills. Listen before you react in anger. Learn from new and uncomfortable angles.”
This list sums up life lessons Christina learned in Costa Rica and brought back home to the United States. Christina has built her life around intentionally learning about the everyday actions of our lives—eating food, drinking water, breathing air, interacting with the environment.
Christina urges us to be aware of the ethical and personal implications our choices have. “We should all be aware of the food we put in our bodies to survive and thrive. I challenge myself and all of us to think about the foods we choose to consume, where they come from, how they are prepared and packaged, their impact on my body and the environment. Become interested in something that gets you excited, pursue it whole-heartedly, and try to be a life-long learner!” she says.
What is water? Christina is living into her answers and her own ethics for using Earth’s resources. So can we, honoring all of God’s creation and preserving it like salt.
