June 2013
M	T	W	T	F	S	S
« May
	1	2
3	4	5	6	7	8	9
10	11	12	13	14	15	16
17	18	19	20	21	22	23
24	25	26	27	28	29	30

Reed, Lewis & Clark Colleges Show that a Little Food Goes a Long Way

Posted by Claire Cummings on June 18, 2013in Featured, Food justice, Food waste - 0 Comments

Urban Gleaners Program Coordinator Ava Mikolavich with soup donated from Lewis & Clark College.

Bon Appétit is known for being thrifty in the kitchen: we cook our own stocks from scratch, we utilize just-in-time-batch cooking techniques, and we buy fresh from local farmers. So when our chefs at Reed and Lewis & Clark Colleges first sat down with Ava Mikolavich from Urban Gleaners to discuss a food recovery program, they were skeptical of how much food they could actually donate.

Still, as Dani Turk from the hunger relief organization Food Life Line once said, “Though it may seem like nothing, one piece of lasagna is still a dinner for a person in need.” So in April, the two schools began donating leftover food that would otherwise go to waste to Urban Gleaners. The two cafés have donated a total of more than 5,000 pounds of food since the start of the program!

The Bon Appétit Dream Comes Alive at Saint Joseph’s College of Maine

Posted by Nicole Tocco on March 4, 2013 - 0 Comments

The “Dream” is a big concept at Bon Appétit: both in terms of the dream itself and the company wide buy-in to the concept. At first, the language struck me as somewhat stiff, but as I visit our cafés along the east coast, the reality of it comes to life for me over and over again.

General Manager Stuart Leckie on the Pearson Town Farm

Saint Joseph’s College of Maine in Standish, ME, was one such visit. Under the leadership of General Manager Stuart Leckie and Executive Chef Christian Bassett, the team at Saint Joseph’s takes what Bon Appétit requires nationwide in terms of social and environmental commitments (no small feat), and pushes each as far as they are able.

More In Farms

Chefs

Reed Chef Shows Students How to Top Ramen the Healthy Way

Posted by Claire Cummings on March 11, 2013 - 0 Comments

Reed students learn critical knife skills in this cooking class organized and led by Bon Appétit.

When I was in school, I didn’t start cooking meals for myself until I moved off-campus at the end of my college career. Frankly, I had no idea how to cook on a budget, in the small campus kitchens, in a way that fit into my busy schedule. Back home, Mom usually cooked for our family of four, moving gracefully between the fully stocked fridge, the cutting board, the oven, and the dinner table, whereas I fumbled my way through it all.

If college students are going to cook, they need it to be simple, affordable, and efficient. And Bon Appétit’s Executive Sous Chef at Reed College, Jenny Nguyen, came up with a great idea for a cooking class that would achieve just that — with a healthful and easy twist on making top ramen, the quintessential college student’s meal.

More In Chefs

Events

A Hot New Twist on Low Carbon Diet Day

Posted by Maisie Greenawalt on April 22, 2013 - 0 Comments

Santa Clara University students snatch up a custom edamame-black bean burger for Low Carbon Diet Day

Last May, I was standing in some strawberry fields in Salinas, CA, listening to Tony Serrano of ALBA Organics talk about seeing the effects of climate change in just the past decade. Ten years ago, the farmers he works with hadn’t been able to grow strawberries in certain areas because it was too cold for them — and now it’s not. “But the biggest manifestation comes in the radical changes in weather,” Tony said. “Sometimes we see a 20-degree difference from one day to the other.”

A young colleague of mine went to Colombia to see where the Cordillera Fair Trade Certified chocolate we use for baking comes from, and came back worried about the cacao industry’s contribution to climate change as well as its effect on farmers.

A friend at Thanksgiving Coffee, an artisan coffee roaster in California, shared the amazing work Thanksgiving is doing with its Rwandan coffee growers to adapt to increased temperatures, shorter ripening periods, and losses in complexity of flavor.

For me, these stories meant climate change stopped being an abstract scientific concept or an animated picture of a polar bear on melting ice cap far, far away and instead pulled up a seat at my table.