The food on your plate might not be real.Real food could be local, or green, but viewed more holistically, it nourishes from seed to table, throughout the whole process. The Midwest is a prime location to talk about real food, given its location at the “epicenter of our commodity food system.” This weekend, Hillel’s Environmental Campus Outreach, Living Wage Campaign and Students for Ecological and Environmental Development is bringing the Midwest Real Food Challenge Summit to campus.
Real Food Challenge is a student-run effort to bring more awareness about food issues to college campuses. “The [current] food system in the U.S. right now has a lot of issues and students really are in a place of power in terms of the change they can influence,” says RFC Midwest Regional Field Organizer Peter Kerns, a junior at Carleton College.
The food system, most simply following your food from farm to table is often a tangled web, raising economic and environmental concerns along the way. Films such as Fast Food Nation (2006) and Food, Inc. (2008), have created a nationwide movement advocating the need for change in the American food system as the relationship between agriculture and climate change becomes more apparent.
“People know that food comes from the farm, or the ocean, but the way that we imagine it is very different from the reality of the food industry,” says SEED member and Weinberg sophomore Molly Barstow, the head of the local planning committee and the liaison between RFC and Northwestern University. “We’re just trying to shed light on the food industry and what we can do to help.”
In terms of taking action on campus, new nuCuisine district manager Steve Mangan, the liaison for Sodexo, nuCuisine’s provider, is interested in bringing more organic foods to the dining halls. From waste reduction by going trayless to developing better relationships with local Chicago area suppliers by working with farms in Michigan and Wisconsin, Northwestern is working towards a greener dining experience. The university is also currently trying to a find a vendor for commercially composting some waste, says Mangan, which used to be illegal in Illinois.
Smaller liberal arts schools have a bigger focus on sustainability, Barstow says. “It’s harder for bigger universities, I think…[but] we’re making advancements that will eventually get us to be hopefully one of the leaders.”
Mangan agrees. “We’re not surrounded by small farms, cheese makers, milk producers,” says Mangan, pointing to Northwestern’s location in the Midwest farm belt area. “I think we’re doing a good job with the resources we have in our environment, but there’s room to grow.”
An initiative that RFC is trying to push on campuses nationwide, including here at Northwestern, is the Real Food Calculator. The Calculator assesses food based on four characteristics: local/community-based, fair, ecologically sound and humane. The idea is to use this as a tool to audit a university’s purchasing policy to see how much money is actually spent on “real food.”
The goal is to get 20 percent real food by the year 2020. “The food service industry in the U.S. every year spends $5 billion on food, and if students have some influence or say over where those dollars go, then we can make some good change in the food system,” explains Kerns, stating that RFC is working to shift $1 billion of the $5 billion towards real food.
The annual summit, this year held at Northwestern, features workshops with local organizations and speakers as well as field trips to sustainable gardens and farms in the Chicago area. The summit will examine food issues in Chicago as the third-largest metropolitan area in the nation, with focuses on food service, nutrition and urban farming.
Capping at a record of 180 registered attendees, over half of which are Northwestern students, this year’s turnout should be the biggest yet of the Midwest summits. “I’m really impressed and really proud of Northwestern for one, such great turnout, and also two, for such fantastic support of us trying to do the summit at Northwestern,” Kerns says.