Bon Appétit Management Company

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. Yet since April, the two cafés have donated a total of more than 5,000 pounds of food!

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.

Cajun Tofu Burger. Spice up your meat-free barbecue options and impress your vegetarian friends. Makes 6 to 8 burgers.

Joining Eckerd students as they follow the journey oranges take from local Mixon Fruit Farms to the cup they fill at a fresh juicing station.

Bon Appétit at Wheaton college works not just with one farm in central Illinois, but an entire family of farms.

One of the best parts about breaking bread together as a community is the chance to sit down and enjoy not just the exchange of tastes, but ideas. America’s fast food habits, which mostly involve people eating alone on the run, don’t allow that to happen. So it was a wonderful treat to have Eric Schlosser, the journalist who wrote the game-changing book Fast Food Nation—the 2001 book that exposed the unsustainable food safety, labor, and animal welfare issues of the fast food industry—visit University of the Pacific in Stockton, CA, for a talk, several farm tours, and a convivial meal.

Through their Farm to Fork purchases, Goucher College Resident District Manager Norman Zwagil and his team are supporting positive change in the tides of agriculture in the Chesapeake Bay region — and one such purchasing relationship is with Big City Farms, a half-acre of greenhouses right in the middle of Baltimore, built on top of an old parking lot .

This burger made of millet and edamame is a nutritious and planet-friendly alternative to ground beef. Using carrot peels as a topping also helps to avoid unnecessary food waste.

Food can be a terrific vehicle to use for educating people about complex topics, and luckily, I work for a company that has an army of chefs who enjoy just this kind of challenge. Bon Appétit was the first food service company to address food’s role in climate change, and every year around Earth Day, our chefs change their menus and explain to their diners at corporations, colleges and universities, and museums in 32 states how their every day food choices affect our planet. For Earth Day today, we’re doing something a little different. Our chefs are standing in front of guests at a cooking demonstration table, making almond-milk-fruit smoothies, cheeseless pizzas, and edamame burgers with carrot peel toppings. They’re talking about how climate change isn’t just this storm gathering way down the road, it’s here and it’s affecting some of our favorite foods.

At Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, FL, the Bon Appétit team is taking advantage of the year-round sun for a café garden.

During National Farmworker Awareness Week, March 24-31, Bon Appétit cafés across the country engaged guests on the topic of farmworkers and the difficult working conditions they face, then shared ways for people to stay informed and become involved in the movement.