{"id":6018,"date":"2015-01-12T14:45:18","date_gmt":"2015-01-12T19:45:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/umaine.edu\/mitchellcenter\/?p=6018"},"modified":"2017-01-31T14:34:11","modified_gmt":"2017-01-31T19:34:11","slug":"honors-college-collaborative-encourages-undergrad-research-on-food-systems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/umaine.edu\/mitchellcenter\/2015\/01\/12\/honors-college-collaborative-encourages-undergrad-research-on-food-systems\/","title":{"rendered":"Honors College Collaborative Encourages Undergrad Research on Food Systems"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"honorsgirls\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Honors College<\/a>\u00a0seniors Audrey Cross and Ashley Thibeault are tracking every single food purchase made by 91르적 Dining Services over a period of two months in the 2012-13 academic year. If this sounds meticulous, it\u2019s because it is. The task involves combing through thousands of line items, noting every acquisition of every bit of dining hall foodstuffs.<\/p>\n

Soon, they\u2019ll 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 Maine EPSCoR <\/a>State Conference in December. It\u2019s all part of a knowledge-to-action strategy.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe want to see if we can get the university to commit to a goal of 20 percent \u2018real food\u2019 by 2020,\u201d said Cross, a senior, whose work is based on the Real Food Challenge<\/a> \u2013 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. \u201cWhere our food comes from means something. We want students to get in the habit of thinking that way, so after they graduate they can\u2019t go back to the ambiguous tomato.”<\/p>\n

This ambitious research and analysis were made possible by grants from a new initiative of 91르적\u2019s Honors College. The Sustainable Food Systems Research Collaborative <\/a>(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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019 work, making it possible to identify common factors and guiding principles that underlie wide-ranging studies in a variety of disciplines. See more on this story<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Honors College\u00a0seniors Audrey Cross and Ashley Thibeault are tracking every single food purchase made by 91르적 Dining Services over a period of two months in the 2012-13 academic year. If this sounds meticulous, it\u2019s because it is. The task involves combing through thousands of line items, noting every acquisition of every bit of dining hall […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":957,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_kad_blocks_custom_css":"","_kad_blocks_head_custom_js":"","_kad_blocks_body_custom_js":"","_kad_blocks_footer_custom_js":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","spc_primary_category":0},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"taxonomy_info":{"category":[{"value":3,"label":"News"}]},"featured_image_src_large":false,"author_info":{"display_name":"mitchellcenter","author_link":"https:\/\/umaine.edu\/mitchellcenter\/author\/mitchellcenter\/"},"comment_info":0,"category_info":[{"term_id":3,"name":"News","slug":"news","term_group":0,"term_taxonomy_id":3,"taxonomy":"category","description":"","parent":0,"count":613,"filter":"raw","cat_ID":3,"category_count":613,"category_description":"","cat_name":"News","category_nicename":"news","category_parent":0}],"tag_info":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/umaine.edu\/mitchellcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/umaine.edu\/mitchellcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/umaine.edu\/mitchellcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/umaine.edu\/mitchellcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/957"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/umaine.edu\/mitchellcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6018"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/umaine.edu\/mitchellcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6018\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11138,"href":"https:\/\/umaine.edu\/mitchellcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6018\/revisions\/11138"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/umaine.edu\/mitchellcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/umaine.edu\/mitchellcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/umaine.edu\/mitchellcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}