Food

As part of National Campus Sustainability Month earlier this quarter, representatives from all three UW campuses came together to discuss topics around food systems and our campus resources.

Update: the video from this event is posted below

The UW Farm is looking for undergraduate students to join the farm staff for the 2021 growing season (mid January through mid December). This student position offers the opportunity to work at farm sites on campus while developing real-life work skills in project management, team work, leadership, communication, volunteer management, food production, food safety, organic practices, and small farm business management. The deadline to apply is December 28.

Post by Gabrielle Coeuille, UW Recycling Waste Diversion & Reduction Intern

When we go to the grocery store, it’s hard to avoid plastic. From produce, to meat, to dairy - packaging is everywhere. Plastic has become so entwined with our food system that it is hard to remember a time when all your seasonal berries didn’t come in a carton that lasts practically forever. So I asked myself this question:

UW graduate student Jonathan Chen has created a UW Food System COVID-19 Survey to better understand how COVID-19 has impacted people's access to food on UW Seattle’s campus. Anyone affiliated with UW Seattle who is 18 or over is invited to participate and enter a drawing to win a $50 gift card to the University Bookstore. Documenting your experience during this difficult time can help improve things for the future.

Take the survey

This is a guest post from 10-year-old Sharda Shah, the daughter of Mauli Shah who works in UW Medicine’s IT Department. As they have been looking for projects at home, this Earth Month they found a solar cooker sitting unused in their shed and decided to try it out. Here are Sharda’s thoughts on using a solar cooker, and how it shows solar energy can be useful even at small scales.

Guest post by UW Farm manager Perry Acworth

Wearing calf-high rubber boots, knit hats, gloves and full foul weather gear - overalls and hooded jackets - two farmers, keeping 6 feet apart if not more, commence transplanting hardened-off, 2-inch high multi-colored Swiss chard. Rain, and then hail, falls the entire day from gray, swiftly moving, cloudy skies. Two times the sun managed to come out, offering a brief break in the downpour.

The UW Food Pantry has an opening for a student Fresh Food and Sustainability Intern. The focus of this position is on food gleaning/recapture from the UW Farm and on-campus dining locations for redistribution at the UW Food Pantry. This might be for you if you enjoy being outside, working with the UW Farm, and are interested in bringing your peers together to reduce food waste and help students in need.

What do you think of when you hear the word soil? When assistant professor Brittany Johnson asks students this question at the start of her Introductory Soils course, words like "dirty," "life," "brown," and "nutrients" come to mind. But soil is much more complex than that, Johnson says.

This Fall, UW Recycling staff once again guest-taught students in the Nutritional Sciences 302 Food Systems class - led by faculty members Yona Sipos and Jennifer Otten - regarding the composting process and how to sort compostable materials on campus.