On Thursdays at dusk, a handful of environmentally minded students gather at the garden just outside Norris University Center to tend to radishes, lettuces and onions, despite the biting chill of a mild but persistent winter. This small patch of land supplies a miniscule fraction of the food served on campus. It’s the only food source at Northwestern where you can actually know, without a doubt, that you’re eating real food that’s sustainably, locally and respectfully grown.
Real Food Coalition wants to increase “real food” on campus with a value-based food system in which students know what they’re eating, where it came from and how it was prepared.
Weinberg sophomore Leigh Gordon-Patti, a member of the coalition, says though the food system has little transparency now, it’s often easy to tell when the meal you’ve been eating in a dining hall isn’t “real food.”
“One of the reasons why I moved off campus this year was because I didn’t enjoy being forced to go to the dining hall when I would bite into lettuce that tasted like tap water,” Gordon-Patti says. “When you bite into an apple that’s mostly wax and it makes your gums bleed because it’s so hard, that’s when you know there isn’t respect in thinking who your consumer’s going to be or what you’re putting into the earth to get this product.”
Created last fall, Real Food Coalition has since worked with dining hall employees, promoting a petition that’s been signed by more than 1,300 students demonstrating support for “real food.” Real Food Coalition has also partnered with other environmental organizations at Northwestern University to sponsor Sustainable Food Talks, a potluck program to establish a dialogue about the state of food in the community.
Tiffany Ozmina, the founder of NU Food Talks and a Facilities Management staff member, reached out to organizations like Real Food Coalition along with groups like SEED and Engineers for a Sustainable World to see if they would be interested in starting the program. This recurring program would bring these organizations together with other Northwestern students, members of the community and local food experts to understand food in a more dynamic and holistic way.
Ozmina recognizes the failures of a broken food system, not just at Northwestern but in the community at large. Farm subsidies result in adverse health effects because they create incentives for farmers to use pesticides and grow convenient commodity crops like corn, wheat and soy. “Now we find that we’re paying for [food] three times,” Ozmina says. “We’re paying for it when we go to the grocery store, we’re paying for it when we pay our taxes and we pay for it when we go to the doctor’s office.”
Rather than rely on industrial agriculture, the Real Food movement fosters relationships across all sectors of the food system, from farmers to food preparation workers to consumers.
One of the farmers who spoke at the most recent panel, Kelly Larsen, represented Windy City Harvest. This urban farm operates as a nonprofit organization that runs many agricultural education programs and teaches inmates at the nearby jail how to farm. Windy City Harvest supplies food cooperatives like Dill Pickle and Green Grocer, and will soon provide some fresh, “real food” to nuCuisine as well.
This is a small step towards big change. Real Food Coalition aims for Northwestern to allocate 20 percent of its food budget to “real food” by 2020, a pledge that schools like Wesleyan University and University of Vermont have already made.
For now, Real Food Coalition’s co-leader Will Bloom simply encourages dialogue and relationships with all stakeholders in the campus food system. “Food is a unifying thing, so it’s important that we do it right,” the McCormick junior says. “If we’ve made a connection at the end of the conversation, then we’ve achieved the real goal of this.”