Celebrating Food Day at Bon Appétit: Grow Your Own!

Written by Bon Appétit Team on October 23, 2012in Education, Events, Farms, Featured - 0 Comments

Started by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, Food Day is an annual nationwide celebration of healthy, affordable, and sustainable food, and a movement to create more of it. This Wednesday, October 24, Bon Appétit locations all across America will proudly celebrate Food Day and its five principles:

• Promoting safer, healthier diets
• Supporting sustainable and organic farms
• Reducing hunger
• Reforming factory farms to protect the environment
• Supporting fair working conditions for food and farmworkers

Last year, Food Day fell a week after the TEDXFruitvale conference we hosted on labor, so our events focused on farmworkers. This year, we’re encouraging our guests to get involved by growing some of their own food, and if they’re students, encouraging them to join Campus Farmers!

Campus Farmers: A Seed is Born

This new, social-media-based community was created to help college students involved on university farms and gardens connect with one another, share photos and documents, and get advice. (Read all about it in this great story for TakePart.com.) It’s a joint project of the Bon Appétit Management Company Foundation (our nonprofit arm, which in 2008 released a Student Garden Guide as a downloadable PDF), and Kitchen Gardeners International, a nonprofit community of 25,000 people from 100 countries who are growing their own food and helping others to do the same. KGI was behind the successful grassroots campaign in 2008 to create a garden on the White House lawn.

BAMCO Foundation Fellow Carolina Fojo (left) with the Gallaudet Garden team and their first harvest

Campus Farmers grew out of the frustration that former BAMCO Foundation Fellow  Carolina Fojo experienced when she was trying to start a garden at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC, along with General Manager Davina Kwong and a few students. Carolina found herself searching the Internet for business plans and garden designs, even though she knew that plenty of schools had done exactly what she was trying to do. But since farm volunteers turn over as students graduate, there was no central place to go for advice and sample documents. The idea for an online community was born. Continue…

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