Farm to Fork shrinks to a few steps

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Rozalie Czesana '18, at work planting microgreens seeds in the Urban Cultivator. (Photo by Sarah Salati Bavuso, Campus Dining Services)

Rozalie Czesana ’18, at work planting microgreens seeds in the Urban Cultivator. (Photo by Sarah Salati Bavuso, Campus Dining Services)

Seedlings at 4 days!

Seedlings at 4 days!

IMG_4915Thanks to Rozalie Czesana ’18 and to Campus Dining Services, customers at Frist’s Cafe Vivian may soon be treated to tastes of intensely local basil, kale, peas, broccoli and radish microgreens.

Czesana, with Sarah Salati Bavuso of CDS, planted seeds in the Urban Cultivator, a hydroponic garden system about the size of a wardrobe, in hopes of growing the leafy greens, but also to encourage conversation on sustainable food systems.

“Small-scale indoor agriculture has the potential to contribute to feeding entire communities when implemented on larger scale,” says Czesana, citing AeroFarms as an example.

See Czesana’s piece that CDS published here (thanks to Sarah and the team!). See the YouTube video on growing basil here.

Class for beginner cooks

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Nicholas Wu

Nicholas Wu

Real World Princeton, a part of the Undergraduate Student Government organization, is pairing with the Cooking Club, Murray-Dodge Cafe and Dining Services to offer workshops for undergraduates who are beginner cooks. Subjects include how to pick groceries, safely prepare food, and construct a meal on a budget.

The workshops will be taught by Nicholas Wu ’18 at the Fields Center Kitchen and are organized by Cailin Hong, USG representative and Paul Yang ’17, Cooking Club president.

On Sunday, participants made asparagus and pasta. On Wednesday, April 20, Wu will teach participants how to make lentil soup and salmon. Class is from 4:30-6pm. Space is limited to 12 participants per session; sign up here. For more information, write Cailin Hong, cailinh@princeton.edu.

Co-founders profiled for work around food study on campus

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Screen Shot 2016-04-19 at 10.44.15 PMEfforts of Gordon Douglas MD ’55 and Sheila Mahoney S’55 were spotlighted in a recent Giving profile from the Office of Development. From the piece:

As a retired physician and professor of medicine, Gordon Douglas ’55 has long known about the links between diet and catastrophic illnesses such as stroke and heart disease. His own bout with high cholesterol prompted him to stop eating meat, which solved the problem and made him think more deeply about food and health. And then he audited an ethics course with his wife, Sheila Mahoney, which graphically illuminated the treatment of animals in large industrial farms. “It turned my world around,” said Mahoney.

Global issues around food production—from CO2 emissions to loss of biodiversity—became a deep interest for Gordon and Sheila. They discovered that there were some Princeton researchers studying aspects of food who didn’t know about each other’s research.

The couple became a driving force behind the creation of Princeton Studies Food, a coalition of faculty, researchers, students, alumni, staff, and community members tackling the challenge of feeding the world’s people while preserving the Earth and its resources.

 

Read the profile here. For more information about the Office of Development, click here.

Talk: Junking tropical forests for junk food?

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Lyndon Estes, right, along with Chef Craig Shelton from FRS 138: Science, Society & Dinner.

Lyndon Estes, ecologist, associate research scholar and lecturer, writes to invite all to postdoc Janice Lee’s talk, “Junking Tropical Forests for Junk Foods?” at the agricultural group meeting he chairs on Wednesday, April 13, at 10 am in EQuad E322.

Lee is a member of Professor David Wilcove’s research team. Here’s information about her from the Wilcove page:

“My research interests span the fields of Conservation Biology, Land Use Change, and Agriculture. Much of my work focuses on the social and ecological consequences of human impacts on the environment especially within Southeast Asia. After having worked on a range of topics in conservation (wildlife trade, invertebrate ecology, habitat fragmentation), I now focus on the conservation and development challenges faced in the context of commercial and small-scale agricultural expansion in the rural tropics. I am deeply interested in the linkages and feedbacks among socio-political, economic and ecological systems, and apply a combination of socioeconomic techniques, geospatial analysis, and simulation modeling in my research to investigate socio-ecological systems.”

Here’s the link to more information on the Wilcove team and its work: http://scholar.princeton.edu/dwilcove/meet-team

 

Science, Society & Dinner course makes PAW

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SSD poster copyShoutout to Mary Hui ’17 for her piece about FRS 138: Science, Society & Dinner, our first course under the Princeton Studies Food umbrella. The course is taught by Professor Kelly Caylor, Lecturer/Chef Craig Shelton and a rotating cast of guest lecturers from disciplines and schools across campus.

From the piece:

They put their coats and bags down in a corner, and quickly donned black aprons. Embroidered in orange letters across the front of each were the words “Science, Society & Dinner.”

This is FRS 138, a freshman seminar that combines lab sessions, cooking lessons from a five-star chef, lectures, field trips, and “outrageously delicious meals that students prepare for each other” to explore the intersections between food systems, food choices, and human health. The class also considers a broader question: How will we sustainably feed nine billion people by the end of this century?

See it here, in the Princeton Alumni Weekly.