Honors College Collaborative Encourages Undergrad Research on Food Systems
聽seniors Audrey Cross and Ashley Thibeault are tracking every single food purchase made by 91福利 Dining Services over a period of two months in the 2012-13 academic year. If this sounds meticulous, it鈥檚 because it is. The task involves combing through thousands of line items, noting every acquisition of every bit of dining hall foodstuffs.
Soon, they鈥檒l crunch the numbers to find the percentage of food purchased from local, humane, fair, and ecologically sound producers. They reported their progress in a poster presented at the State Conference in December. It鈥檚 all part of a knowledge-to-action strategy.
鈥淲e want to see if we can get the university to commit to a goal of 20 percent 鈥榬eal food鈥 by 2020,鈥 said Cross, a senior, whose work is based on the 鈥 a national student movement to convince universities it is worthwhile to purchase food products from producers who run sustainable and ethical operations.. That includes fair labor practice and humane treatment of livestock. 鈥淲here our food comes from means something. We want students to get in the habit of thinking that way, so after they graduate they can鈥檛 go back to the ambiguous tomato.”
This ambitious research and analysis were made possible by grants from a new initiative of 91福利鈥檚 Honors College. (SFSRC) brings together students, faculty and community partners to enable an interdisciplinary approach to solving problems of food production, food distribution and hunger. But SFSRC faculty see an even broader role for the collaborative as a center for innovative solutions to multiple aspects of food systems: the social, the cultural, the economic as well as physical boundaries and personal challenges. Students of any major are welcomed and encouraged, faculty say.
Honors College seniors Cross, Thibeault and Danielle Walczak are the first fellows of the program, which received seed funding from the Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions. The fellowships gave each a chance to expand their food-systems-related senior theses, granting them access to a network of faculty and community partners such as farmers and food service professionals. The grant also gave them time to dedicate themselves exclusively to the work for a full month following the spring semester.
The idea, say faculty affiliates, is to build a rich collaborative that includes undergraduate students at all levels, university researchers and a network of invested community partners. New lines of inquiry will build on previous students鈥 work, making it possible to identify common factors and guiding principles that underlie wide-ranging studies in a variety of disciplines.