In any of its areas of intervention – school education, adult training, art therapy, agriculture and the processing of products using biodynamic farming methods – HARPA’s Educational Project covers three essential aspects of the human development process: Education, Health and Ecology.
The food that is practiced in the HARPA space is part of its principles and forms of implementation in this Educational Project.
As an anthroposophical educational project based on Waldorf Pedagogy, located on a farm with diverse natural potential, where the principles of biodynamic agriculture are applied, it first and foremost values nature as the great teacher of life, where both children and adults can learn and learn from the truth, the beauty and the good that the course of the year constantly offers us.
It is an eminently ecological project whose essence and goal is to learn to be in tune with nature’s need for man: to be loved and respected in order to be able to offer it the prodigality of its “services”.
Each new day, looking closely at the evolution of its manifestations, learning to know it as the faithful custodian of life, nurtures in each child – and in each of us – a growing affectionate dedication that will make us its protectors and carers.
Little by little, at each stage of their school career, children learn to grow by helping the mother earth to grow: to use their hands to prepare the cradle that welcomes the seeds; to take care of every moment of their growth; to be attentive to the difficulties of that same growth, trying to restore the lost balance with care and affection; to harvest with a thousand cares, but above all with a heart flooded with gratitude, the “fruit” finally ready to feed man, be it a tender lettuce, a golden corn cob, apples that perfume the air, red medronhos or black olives… They also learn that, throughout the ages, the unique qualities of each “fruit” bear witness to a wealth of properties that exist to care for the existence of living beings. But you have to learn to read them in the scent, the color, the acidity or the aftertaste, in their vertical or horizontal growth and then learn to capture them in balsamic oils, in healing teas, in jams that last…
Thus, in the very growth of the child, from the memory of the body to the profound experiences of the soul, the coherence that overflows from the processes of life in nature is inscribed.
The need to preserve this coherence begins to resonate in your body’s vital processes and health acquires a meaning far beyond the vitamins and minerals that food contains: it actually acquires a moral and ethical significance. Let’s see why.
In the scope of this way of looking and feeling, eating consists of ingesting the qualities of the animal, vegetable and mineral world and, through a process of deconstructing matter, which turns it back into chaos, extracting the essence of these qualities from it, once freed from the organization of the previous structure.
What our body finds through the work that the liver, stomach, pancreas, etc. carry out in this process, is the truth or falsehood of that food, in relation to the source that gave rise to it:
Some examples are:
“Sugar”, which isn’t actually sugar, but a processed product that turns out to be sweet in the mouth; fruit or vegetables whose growing conditions have prevented them from developing their genuine qualities, which would be revealed in taste, smell and consistency, and in which only their outward appearance remains; food of animal origin, whose life has been alien to its own characteristics, in a continuous frustration of its basic instincts that should bind it to life.
The truth and lies on which the life of each food was built is incorporated into each one of us, helping to feed the coherence or incoherence of our actions.
When Hippocrates said that we are what we eat, he was referring to this information that persists in us, brought from the world through food.
Eating a food that brings us the message of the fertility of the soil that germinated it, the light and warmth of the sun that raised and matured it, the water that watered it, the comfort of the sour taste of fresh grass in the freedom of a meadow, but also the affection of the hands that cared for it, the respect of the gaze that venerated it, the gratitude of those who harvested it…
To eat this food is to integrate the moral quality of the natural world and the ethical quality of the human world.
It means keeping in body and soul, like a hidden treasure, the ability to never lose wonder at the generous beauty of life and trust in the goodness of mankind.
When a small child gazes ecstatically at the five-pointed star that the apple holds inside and that the child’s eyes have seen emerge from a delicate flower whose petals have been blown by the wind; when an older child sees the warm color of the pumpkin she has sown or the bright green freshness of the leaves of a lettuce she has planted, when she receives what she is going to eat on her plate, she will experience veneration in the depths of her being for the gifts of the earth contained in each food item.
