Sustainability Through Food!

With the new semester came a new change for Sustainability Through Food. This semester, our group is missing one member because Lydia is studying abroad at the University of Leeds in England. Although we only have four people in our group now, we are still committed to learning how to cook sustainably!

We can’t believe how fast January flew by! It seems like the first day of classes for the second semester was yesterday, and yet it’s already February! This month, our group focused on continuing our efforts in learning to cook healthy, sustainable meals. We had plans to attend a cooking class at Whole Foods as well as cook on our own, but unfortunately red tape and scheduling conflicts prevented us from doing so. As a result, the group put all of their energy into making our poster for the VIP Showcase! Everyone in the group had a hand in the design, content, and layout of the poster. Even Lydia took time to send us the pictures that she took of our group last semester, and she is currently in Europe! We’re all very happy with the finished product, and we can’t wait to show it off at the VIP Showcase later this February.

Sustainability Through Food is looking forward to what the rest of the semester will bring. We’ve already planned our first project for February: cooking a three-course meal!

Sustainability Through Food: November's already over?

 Well, after a stressed, busy, (and yet, for Vanderbilt, normal) November in which our daily lives were all thrown happily askew for a week as we went home, we can all firmly say that flexibility was the theme of our month.   Strangely, although our individual paths went all sorts of crazy directions, they all managed to converge into one by the end.  Our planned big project for this month was to help Beyond Tutoring by cooking a meal for their kids or teaching the kids some cooking skills, but bureaucratic red tape unfortunately postponed this idea until next semester.  So, what did we do as we tried to rearrange our schedules to incorporate a new project?  Well, we actually did a lot.

Jose and Caitlin (your author) organized a group of Vanderbilt students to attend the School Of the Americas (SOA) protest at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia on November 19-21st.  The SOA is a US military academy that trains Latin American officers and soldiers.  Unfortunately, many of its graduates have atrocious human rights records, such as former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, yet the school is still open and running as normal.  Although the main focus of the trip was to learn about ending US militarization in Latin America (…and beyond), we learned an immense amount about the path of food from plant to plate, for the weekend also included many workshops by progressive organizations at the local convention center.

We met members of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) and attended a talk by the maker of the documentary Killer Coke.  The CIW’s modern slavery museum was astounding as we viewed the shackles with which people had been held as slaves in the Southeast US.  The slavery cases ranged from the years 1997 and 2008.  Coca-Cola, meanwhile, can be held guilty for a vast number of crimes ranging from supporting the murder of union workers in its factories in Colombia to child labor and environmental abuse in El Salvador.  (For more info, go to www.killercoke.org and www.ciw-online.org)

What does this say about the consumption of food in the United States?  The hegemony of transnational corporations seems to have become more important than the livelihood of countless human beings across the world, including Americans.  Surely there are better ways to feed and sustain ourselves rather than subjugating those that certain groups have decided are less than or deviant from the status quo.

Everyone else in our group learned new things about our groups theme or utilized knowledge that we’ve learned this semester as well.  For example, Hayley volunteered at the Dismas House and helped cook chicken alfredo, Lydia helped cook breakfast for dinner on her TBS retreat, and Sarah learned how to make her grandma’s sweet potatoes over Thanksgiving.  Lastly, we were finally able to do something as a group together.  We watched Supersize Me and learned even more about America’s food industry.

Turkey Lasagna Dinner - Sustainability Through Food

Trial and Error

For this month, we made turkey lasagna for dinner, which the recipe came from Caitlin’s mother.  One lesson we learned from the recipe is trial and error. As we cooked our meal, we had difficulty reaching consensus of how we should set up the layering of the lasagna because some of us followed directions on the recipe or followed own instinct. We finally reached an agreement. The lesson taught from this meal is that we can never make a recipe perfect, it takes time and practice. The purpose of a recipe is to guide you in cooking your meal, but as a cook, we can make little changes on the way. As our group got together to eat our meal, we greatly enjoyed our turkey lasagna. At the end of the day, lasagna will be lasagna regardless of the order of the layers.

Before!

After!

Sustainably Cooking Omelets

This previous Sunday we went to Davis Cookware in Hillsboro Village and learned about various types and brands of cooking utensils, especially knives.  We learned proper knife care and safety and how to tell when your knives are dull.  They also told us about the fine teas and coffees that they sell and about their free knife sharpening service. 

Our group did our first cooking project this evening.  We had four of our members with us because Hayley could not be with us this evening.  Two of our members, Caitlin and Jose, went out to the farmers' market and Harris Teeter and bought eggs, spinach, cheese, several types of peppers, avocado, salsa, basil, and other ingredients to make omelets.  Lydia, who has cooked omelets before, taught proper omelet making technique to the members of the group.  Caitlin taught everybody the best ways to cut and peel garlic and onions.  We used such sustainable ingredients as eggs from pasture-fed chickens, organic spinach, locally grown tomatoes and peppers from the farmer's market, and locally made salsa.  Jose and Sarah, who had never cooked omelets before, did a great job their first time!  Everyone's omelets turned out very well and tasted delicious!
We are so excited to be getting into our project!

Sustainability Through Food

Hi Everyone!

I am posting for the Sustainability: Self, Community, and Environment group. Our project is centered around the idea of becoming more self-sufficient as you progress through college, not only by learning to live on a college campus on your own but learning to take care of yourself and the community in the best way possible once you get into the real world. The way that we want to do this is by first learning to cook, then, learning to cook in a way that is environmentally responsible. Lastly, we plan to share our findings with the greater Vanderbilt and Nashville communities.

Our first project is based off of the book The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan. In the book, Pollan makes three meals. The first is comprised entirely of food from a fast food restaurant. The second meal is comprised entirely of organic food purchased from farmer’s markets and Whole Foods. The third meal is made of food he found, hunted or grew himself. Taking the second and third meals for inspiration, we began to think of ideas we could do here in our dorm rooms. I have planted basil seeds in a pot that I keep on a windowsill in my room.  We plan on using this basil, once it is big enough, in dishes that we make throughout the year. The one that we are most looking forward to is a Caprese salad, made using the basil from my room, tomatoes that we purchase at the Vanderbilt Farmer’s Market and mozzarella cheese that we will learn to make from our friend that makes cheese at home. Sounds pretty yummy, right?