the UW Sustainability blog
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.
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.
The UW American Indian Studies Department and Na’ah Illahee Fund invite Individual, Panel, or Workshop abstracts for the “Living Breath of wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ” Indigenous Foods Symposium to be held on May 1 & 2, 2020 at the University of Washington’s wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ Intellectual House.
Submissions are due on January 20, 2020.
This Spring, UW Recycling staff guest-taught students in the Nutritional Sciences 302 Food Systems class - led by faculty member Yona Sipos - regarding the composting process and how to sort compostable materials on campus. The students were then given an assignment to think about ways the University of Washington could reduce food waste.
We've included a selection of the student thoughts below:
The UW Food Pantry, "Any Hungry Husky," is hiring a student position which will work collaboratively with the leadership of the UW Food Pantry, the UW Farm, and Housing and Food Services (HFS) to develop and implement a strategy and processes to supply the Food Pantry with food grown on The Farm and remaining from Housing and Food Service locations.