Tufts Food Week will be held for the first time starting today, featuring a number of different events focusing on food and food-related issues.
Food Week is organized by Tufts Food for Thought, a student group co-founded by seniors Emily Wyner and Mariah Gruner last October in response to the campus' lack of an organization that addresses food-related issues such as the growth, production and preparation of food, according to Wyner. Tufts Food for Thought became a branch organization of Tufts Sustainability Collective in January.
Food Week was planned to coincide with the national celebration of Food Day on Wednesday, according to Wyner, director and co-founder of Food for Thought.
"The hope was that we just would broadly raise awareness for some of these issues," she said. "So the idea was to have as many little events as we could in a week."
Events for the week include a film screening of the documentary "King Corn" and tours of the Davis Square Farmers Market and Tom Thumb's Student Garden. Tufts Culinary Society on Thursday will be hosting a cooking demonstration for students interested in learning how to make butternut squash pasta and apple crisp.
Some of the events hosted during Food Week are organized or co-sponsored by other organizations on campus, including Tufts Hillel, according to Wyner.
Sara Gardner, a freshman, proposed the idea for Food Week during Food for Thought's first meeting last month.
"The first Food for Thought meeting was a giant brainstorm session of ideas of projects that we could do throughout the year relating to food, and so I brought out this idea," Gardner said.
Much of the early development and planning for Food Week was spearheaded by Gardner and senior Eric Siegel, but members of Food for Thought worked collaboratively to plan the week's events, according to Gardner.
"I would love to see people starting to really think about their food - where it comes from, what it's made with, who does it affect, what does it affect beyond the immediate tangible action of eating," she said.
Gardner explained that members of Food for Thought were able to head specific events if they wanted.
"If you have a real interest in this thing, you have the ability to lead this activity, but where people weren't so interested, we would just sort of pick up the slack and do it as a group and a big cooperative thing," Gardner said.
Both Wyner and Gardner expressed interest in continuing the tradition of Food Week in years to come.
"This year I'm sure in many ways will be a learning process for us to see what worked and what didn't," Wyner said.
Wyner said the group aims to increase awareness about food-related issues through the events and activities planned this week.
"I think it's a very easy issue to overlook, and there's
a divide [between] people who care a lot about food and food systems
[and] those that don't and are unfamiliar," she said. "I would hope to sort of bridge that divide in a fun, creative, inclusive way."
