Northwestern students celebrated the third annual national Food Day on Wednesday and Thursday with events promoting policies that support healthy and sustainable foods.
The campaign included preparing sandwiches for local food kitchens, a gardening workshop, a sustainability discussion, a farmer’s market at The Rock and a food access panel.
Event coordinators, Weinberg senior Soad Mana and Weinberg junior Christine Gou, said this diverse range of activities and events wase the best way to promote food access.
“Food is such a huge topic,” Mana said. “I feel like we wouldn’t have done it justice to just do one event.”
Food Day was planned by Mana and Gou in collaboration with many campus organizations, including Campus Kitchens, nuCuisine, Green Cup, NU Sustainable Food Talks, NU Veg Society, SPOON Magazine, the Office of the President and others. Mana and Gou worked with the organizations since July to create the event.
“When you’re planning an event this big, you have to plant that seed early,” Mana said.
Food Day is also a national movement that was started by the Center for Science in Public Interest in 2011. It is powered by small groups who host events in the community and on school campuses.
The event is planned to promote awareness of health problems caused by the typical American diet of fast food and focuses on ways to make fresh, healthy foods more readily available to those with financial needs.
To showcase this issue to NU, Midwest Foods, a program that brings fresh produce to establishments in the Midwest, held a farmer’s market at The Rock on Thursday.
“It’s really nice to have a farmer’s market on campus,” Weinberg freshman Georgie Wilkins said. “Whole Foods is the only grocery store nearby, but it’s too expensive for an average college student budget, so I have trouble finding fresh produce.”
McCormick senior Deejay Jefferson also noted the difficulties of purchasing fruits and vegetables in urban areas.
“Eating healthy can be frustrating because it’s so expensive,” Jefferson said. “You tell yourself that you want to eat healthy, but when you go to a grocery store, you may find that a stalk of broccoli is more expensive than a cheeseburger.”
The campaign also included a food access panel featuring keynote speakers from institutions such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture, food depositories and farmers markets. They discussed subjects including government policies regarding sustainable food and fresh produce access for urban areas.
“We really wanted the Food Day campaign at Northwestern to focus on food access,” Gou said. “We thought it’d be perfect to bring in a panel that discussed just that.”
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Twitter: @LanNguyen_NU
