October 27, 2011
On Saturday, Oct. 22, Slow Food Hamilton College sponsored a potluck dinner and workshop centered around National Food Day, Oct. 24. According to Ellie Fausold ’13, one of the co-leaders of Hamilton’s Slow Food branch, “the purpose of bringing Real Food Challenge to campus this past weekend was to continue to raise awareness about food issues here on campus and teach us about what we can do to influence the food that we eat.” The hope was that community members “would come out of the workshops being both more educated about the food-related issues that we’re facing and inspired to start taking action.”
The workshop was led by Stefy Narváez and Zack Peterson, representatives of Real Food Challenge—a national organization committed to providing a network of food allies and increasing the power of youth, colleges and universities in order to have a healthy food system. Real Food Challenge’s primary goal is to transfer $1 billion of current university money that goes toward purchasing food and use it to buy “real food” by 2020. Because colleges and universities spend so much money on food, almost $5 billion every year, they possess power within the food industry to demand change.
According to the Real Food Challenge website, “real food” is “food which truly nourishes producers, consumers, communities and the earth.” The Real Food initiative stresses the importance of maintaining human dignity through proper farm worker rights, treating animal humanely and promoting environmentally sustainable practices. The Real Food campaign encompasses issues from human rights to environmental sustainability.
One of the important messages that this campaign endorses is that college students have a huge role in the future of the food system. Narváez and Peterson presented information on the corporate food system and how dining services such as Bon Appétit operate. They spoke about the faults of industrial food production and how students can improve our campus’ food culture.
So far, the initiatives started by Real Food Challenge have gotten college campuses around the nation to commit more than $34 million to providing real food in their dining halls. One main goal is to have every college and university president in our country sign a Real Food Campus Commitment and pledge to purchase 20 percent real food for the campus by 2020.
Lauren Howe ’13 and Eunice Choi ’14 started a branch of Slow Food at Hamilton last spring. According to Howe, she and Choi “felt like there was a serious disconnect between students and the food they consume everyday in the dining halls.” The goal was to have a student organization that would “foster discussion, raise awareness and implement change on campus” through “protesting the corporate food system and showing our peers that there is an alternative way—that food exists in a form that is healthy for the earth and ourselves and can serve as a vehicle for social change.”
Slow Food meets Mondays at 8 p.m. in Kirner-Johnson. For its next event, it will screen the documentary Chocolate Country, a film that discusses how fair trade chocolate industry in the Dominican Republic empowers local cacao farmers, on Oct. 31 at 7:30 p.m. in the Red Pit. Other events for the semester include a potluck meal for Slow Food USA’s “$5 Challenge—Take Back the Value Mean” campaign, a screening of the film Fresh and cooking classes with the Mohawk Valley Chapter of Slow Food.