Real+Food+Challenge+Update

The Real Food Challenge is booming! I want us all to stay updated on this challenge that we are working to get Western to adopt!

Give a short blurb about the Real Food Challenge to all of your classes/clubs/groups! **sample blurb**

so here is the web page where you can sign onto the list serve: **realfoodchallenge.org**
Real Food Challenge Trainings [|THIS SUMMER]!!!

and here are **a few articles** about this grassroots student movement that can inspire and bring us closer to our coop and overall goal of sustainability at Western! __** Sign a petition: International Solidarity urging President Lugo from Paraguay to veto the Agrotoxics Law  **__

[|http://www.forbes.com/2009/06/ 11/feed-the-world-activists- opinions-contributors-food- inc.html]

[|What the financial collapse can teach us about the food system]

 [|http://uci.edu/uci/ features/feature_vorealfood_ 090615.php]

[|http://www.slowfoodusa.org/ index.php/slow_food/blog_post/ agribusiness_vs_university_ dining_services/#When:14:27: 13Z]

[|http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ leslie-hatfield/green-food- movement-spark_b_206848.html]

Last weekend, before a packed house at Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Library, Michael Pollan declared the recent surge in activist work and interest in food politics a "movement." As usual, Pollan had a lot of great things to say that night, but this piece stood out to me. Friends and colleagues and I have been talking about the local/sustainable/good food movement for years, but many writers have been reticent to pronounce it that, so it was exciting that he would venture out onto that limb, even if he qualified it, and rightfully so, as many smaller movements (toward food security movement, food safety, labor rights and so on). Pollan went on to talk about how much of this movement is happening amongst youths on college campuses, another great point because, though there are food activists as young as fourth graders (who, in Wisconsin, recently attempted an [|"Eat-In" to protest school lunches]), becoming politically active is something of a rite of passage for college students. There are tons of student groups doing amazing work on all of the food fronts, including the [|Real Food Challenge] (see their video below, hat tip to [|Good Farm Movement]) and the [|Student Farmworker Alliance]. Slow Food also has chapters on many college campuses, and UNC Chapel Hill is home to [|FLO Food], as is UC Berkeley to the Society for Agriculture and Food Ecology ([|SAFE]), which was founded by perhaps the country's most prolific and well known young farmer/activist, Severine von Tscharner Fleming, the head of the Greenhorns.