GreenHouse Global Food for Thought Meals

One of the new happenings in my life that I hope to write more about in this space is a new small job I've taken on as a Food Programming Liaison for the University of Wisconsin's GreenHouse, an environmental living community on campus. The GreenHouse is located on one floor of a campus dorm, and has around 50 students (mostly freshmen), who are all interested in environmental issues, and who engage with these issues on a daily basis in their living space.  There's a faculty sponsor (an awesome professor in Community and Environmental Sociology who embodies what it means to be an academic with one foot solidly outside the ivory tower), and several other interns and staff members who have experience in food justice, agriculture, and activism. I'm really excited about being part of this. (So excited!)

One of the main responsibilities of this job is running this Global Food for Thought Meal Series, which is basically a one-credit seminar that involves cooking and eating and discussing related readings (you might say the goal of the seminar is "dining and opining"!).  Each session, I'll help to bring in a chef from a Madison restaurant that specializes in international fare of some sort, and that chef will work with Dining Services folks to prepare a meal based on a particular ethnic cuisine.  Then, after dinner, we'll have a post-prandial* discussion, based on some readings that give social/cultural/political context to the food situation in the particular place from which that cuisine emerged. Cool, eh?

This past Wednesday was actually the first Global Food for Thought Meal, but I was sadly at home, because the 13+ inches of snow that Madison got in this last blizzard kept the buses from running and me from venturing out. The meal, based on this Bittman piece, was to be:

• Apple cider
• Selection of breads from Bakehouse Bakery
• Chopped cabbage salad with apples and walnuts in a red wine vinaigrette
• Chicken (and for vegetarians, chicken-less) mushroom stir fry in a dry marsala sauce served over local RP’s pasta
• Cajun style red beans and rice
• Baked apple crisp with fresh whipped cream

...all recipes modeled after stock recipes that Bittman suggests have sustained scores of generations in scores of societies worldwide.  The other reading for the class was to be one of my favorites: Wendell Berry's 1990 piece "The Pleasures of Eating."  Eating is most certainly an agricultural act.

The other part of the job in addition to the Global Meals series, as I understand it, is just to engage the students in various food-related activities: impromptu cooking sessions, trips to local farms, jaunts to the winter farmer's market (a delightful Madison space, about which more soon), and so on. Any suggestions from folks out there on exciting ways to bring college students into the world of food?! I'd love to hear 'em...

* I just learned the term "post-prandial" from this awesome GreenHouse faculty sponsor, who also spontaneously sends the students poems from the New Yorker about Topsy the Elephant.