Get real: Events promote sustainability, healthy foods

Events over the past showed Pitt students how the environmental sustainability of food is just as important as taste.

Pitt’s Fair Food Cooperative Club, a Pitt-based club that focuses on spreading awareness about “real food” — or local, fair, humane and ecologically sound food —  hosted a series of events this past week to teach students sustainable food practices. 

Steve Nicolet, a premed senior majoring in urban studies, and Jess McDonald, a senior majoring in environmental studies, started The Fair Food Cooperative Club earlier this year. The club supports the Real Food Challenge, a national organization that strives to help college students push for healthier and greener on-campus dining services. 

Starting March 24, several clubs joined together to put on events to table and inform students of many different aspects of the food system as part of Real Food Week. The weeklong series of events are an expansion of Real Food Day, an event held last March by the members of the Real Food Challenge. As part of one activity, the Fair Food Cooperative Club worked with Corey Hawk, the head chef at Market Central, to increase the percentage of real food in Market. Earlier this week, Hawk made a pledge to provide more real food offerings at Market Central in the future. To show support for the effort on Monday and Tuesday, each item of real food at Market Central featured a sign describing which aspect of it qualified it to be real food, whether it be a part of the fair, local, humane or ecologically sound categories of real food.

Last Tuesday, an amplified version of the symposium held last year on Real Food Day was held in the Union. This year, the event included more clubs as well as donations from Chipotle, a Mexican fast food chain that has multiple restaurants in the Pittsburgh area. 

Chipotle is a prime example of a large, successful restaurant chain that has managed to maintain the use of real food through its efforts to only use humanely raised and non-genetically modified ingredients, according to McDonald.

Jon Berger, Pittsburgh’s regional Real Food representative, came to the Union on Wednesday to talk to students about the Real Food Challenge and how to get involved. He held two workshops, called The Real Food Challenge: Uniting Students for a Healthy, Just, Sustainable Food System and Social Justice in the Food System. 

At these workshops, Berger guided students through discussion and activities, forcing them to think about where their food was coming from, how the food system affected other parts of their life, current problems with the food system and what they can do to start fixing these problems. 

Anna Greenberg, a freshman majoring in environmental studies, said this week’s events help promote awareness for a healthier and more sustainable environment.

“Real Food Week gives students more opportunities because if a student gets really passionate about an issue, they can become involved in that aspect right away because the club is right there in front of them,” Greenberg, who is also a member of the Fair Food Cooperative Club, said.

Holly Giovengo, who is also a member of the club, sees Real Food Week as a “gateway to awareness.” Giovengo, a junior studying French and sociology, said that this is because exposing students to important issues will inspire many of them to get involved. 

Students across campus have already showed their increased involvement through partnerships with the cooperative by joining the club’s mission to have 20 percent of Market Central’s food be real by the year 2020. 

Three environmental student organizations at Pitt — Free the Planet, Students for Sustainability and Take Back the Tap — signed an agreement March 19 to help The Fair Food Cooperative Club spread awareness about real food and what students can do to support the Real Food Challenge. According to a 2013 report from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 2 million people become ill because of antibiotic-resistant infections, which will lead to 23,000 deaths in the United States.

McDonald said the effort to feature real food in Market Central will help lower the risk of these infections and promote a growing trend to be healthy.

To help accomplish her goal, McDonald brought the Real Food Challenge to Pitt last October.

The Real Food Challenge is a national organization that has been incorporated into more than 20 universities since its creation in 2007. As a part of the challenge, students work to first discover how much real food is already on their campus through an extensive set of calculations, and then, to increase this number to at least 20 percent.

According to Susan Fukushima, resident district manager for Sodexo — the company Pitt uses for its dining services — Sodexo employees are helping the students by providing a list of products from Sodexo’s primary vendors and their primary uses in Market Central.

In order to complete the calculation, the involved students will put the provided data into a calculator that puts each individual ingredient through a rigorous criteria to determine whether or not it is considered real food.  

“We are currently in the data gathering stage. Once the data is tabulated to determine how much real food we currently serve, we will be able to set goals to become more sustainable and offer more real food,” Fukushima said.

Pitt could be the first school in the Athletic Coast Conference to sign the Real Food Challenge commitment, McDonald said.

“Signing on shows that we are truly invested, a leader in more than just academics and research. We would be setting the bar very high,” McDonald said.

Nicolet said that just because the quality of food increases, that doesn’t mean it should become less enjoyable.

“The point of real food is not to strip food of its pleasurable aspects, but to provide fair, local, humane and ecologically sound sources of food,” Nicolet said.

According to Nadin Suler, another member of The Fair Food Cooperative Club, the local criteria of real food requires that everything is processed and distributed within 250 miles of the University. Fifty percent of the food must also come from the same area and be community-based, meaning the company providing the food makes less than 1 percent of profits compared to the industry leaders. 

To be ecologically sound, the food must pass a series of certifications, including USDA organic and certification from the Rainforest Alliance. Anything that contains genetically modified ingredients is immediately disqualified. 

According to Nicolet, anything high in fructose corn syrup falls into this category as well.

“Food experts have criticized high fructose corn syrup mostly because of its unnecessary use. It ties back to being used for profits because it is the cheapest. But it leads to very harmful effects,” Nicolet said. 

According to McDonald, in order for food to be considered real food, it only has to meet one of the four requirements and not be immediately disqualified based on special circumstances.  

For the members of the Fair Food Cooperative Club, Real Food Week is just a starting point for future goals. 

Nicolet has plans to take trips to a local food source each week with other interested students to give students an image of a successful business in Pittsburgh that is making money and food in a safe and sustainable way.

According to McDonald, this Saturday, members of the Fair Food Cooperative Club will visit the farmer’s market in the Strip District to try some locally produced food. 

Nicolet also described a “funky” idea to start a food truck on campus serving any food that the club has deemed to be real in order to spread excitement and knowledge about real food on campus.

Members of the Fair Food Cooperative Club have been tabling inside of Market since its inception in October 2013 to encourage students to sign on as “support pledges.” Pledging symbolizes an agreement with the initiative’s goals and that the students will make an effort to promote real food in their everyday lives. 

Since it began tabling, the Cooperative has garnered about 1,400 signatures, which it plans to show the University as proof that the student population is supporting its initiatives.

The Fair Food Cooperative Club had previously reached out to other clubs on campus and has already gained 14 partners in total.  

“As partners, the clubs will take the real food initiative and innovate it in a way that supports their club goals,” Suler said.. 

Giovengo said getting other students interested and involved in the effort isn’t hard.

“You can attack it from any standpoint and get people to care because there is so much going on,” she said. “You have to use your power as a consumer and know where your food is coming from and what your money is going toward.”