Campus food options are about to get real.
A national campaign sweeping schools across the country, the Real Food Challenge urges college administrators, faculty and students to re-evaluate the quality and source of food being served to the student body.
The Real Food Challenge’s goal for each participating school is for a university president to sign the Real Food Campus Commitment — a document that officiates a campus’s commitment to serve 20 percent real food by 2020.
“‘Real food’ is defined as ethically produced food from local and community based sources,” said Carmen Black, assistant coordinator for the Real Food Challenge.
“As a national goal, we aim to shift college and university dining purchases toward local and community based, ecological sound or humane food,” Black said. “We have this very specific definition because our students spent six years coming up with it. Only if a food fits the criteria of any one of those categories, then it counts as real food.”
The project uses a “Real Food Calculator” to track institutional purchasing of “real food” over time in order to implement a student-driven research project analyzing where campus food is raised and how much is produced within a year.
Schools can then compare findings to national standards to see how much real food makes its way into the mouths of students.
In addition to the “Real Food Calculator,” Black and Jon Berger, regional coordinator, can also analyze the invoices of items purchased by Aramark to determine the quality and ultimate costs for each of the campus’ dining establishments.
Mary Patterson, marketing director for Volunteer Dining, said the Real Food Challenge is already making strides with Aramark to educate dining employees and administrators on the steps necessary to improve the quality of food on campus.
“We have already done some research on our own and found that some of the elements of Real Food Challenge were already in place,” Patterson said. “We’re looking forward to this movement, and are excited that students want to get involved in the process.”
Though the issue of mandatory meal plans was tabled in response to initial backlash, UT has announced its hope to enact a new meal policy by the fall of 2015, including $300 Dining Dollars for every undergraduate student.
Neil Brown, a senior in chemical engineering and co-founder of Project VEGGIE, hopes an introduction into Real Food Challenge will spark fresh conversation around real food as a feasible component for future campus dining.
“We want to make sure this topic is brought up in a way to pressure SGA, somewhat, but also rekindles the conversation, especially since we’ve already passed our resolution and want to get things going again,” Brown said.
The Real Food Challenge’s presence at next Tuesday’s Student Government Association Senate meeting will be one of many steps toward rallying the foundational support needed to impact UT’s changing policies for on-campus dining.
“Hopefully, RFC can interject the trajectory of the mandatory meal plan and change it to where we see a potential future in which UT will make more money without [the meal plan],” Brown said. “What I’m hoping will happen is that more people buy more meals and realize they don’t need a mandatory meal plan because of [the influence of] Real Food Challenge.”
For Black, the true indicator of the new campaign’s success will come from unifying students from diverse backgrounds and experiences through the common cause of food.
“We are the first generation of young people to have a shorter life expectancy than our parents because of diet-related illnesses,” Black said. “So there are very real and very immediate reasons to be eating food that nourishes us,” Black said.
For more information about the Real Food Challenge, visit realfoodchallenge.org, like the page on Facebook or follow @realfoodnow on Twitter for updates.
