In the busy life of a student there is little chance for pause, reflection and community.
Yet, on Monday evenings during the school year you can hear Jamal Moussa, Family Dinner Night co-director, announce the menu for the night in the Crossing basement to a silent crowd of around 100 hungry attendees.
Slow Food UW has been inviting campus and community members to their family dinners since 2009. The dinners feature a three-course meal made from local, seasonal and sustainable ingredients for $5 a person. Aiming to be the antithesis of fast food, Slow Food proudly cast a snail as their logo.
Part of Slow Food’s mission is providing good, clean, fair food for all. At both Family Dinner Nights and their more casual, weekly café guests who cannot afford the price of a meal can use the Pay it Forward Program. Operated through donations, the program ensures that finances are not a barrier for people engaging with the Slow Food environment.
"The community sense of eating meals I think is really important,” Keidl said. “That's one thing I really like about FDN and what makes it a little different from Cafe is that everyone eats at the same time so it is a lot about the family aspect of eating, sharing a meal, sharing the conversations."
This week, Slow Food UW partnered with F.H. King Students for Sustainable Agriculture to create a menu featuring ingredients including pumpkin, kale, cauliflower and two full bushes of aronia berries from F.H. King’s one acre farm near Eagle Heights.
“Our tuition pays for it. I just learned that,” Moussa said while squeezing handfuls of aronia berries for dessert that evening.
The impetus for the collaboration was a spark in the mind of F.H. King farmhand and FDN intern Claire Widmann.
“I feel like it kind of makes a lot of sense if part of Slow Food’s mission is sourcing from local farms that we have groups of students on campus growing food,” Widmann said. “It was almost in due time that we worked together to make a meal.”
Both student organizations emphasize the importance of creating sustainable food systems. Moussa believes that by going to an event such as a Family Dinner Night, students may begin to change the way they think about buying food locally.
“My whole thing is just trying to teach people that, ‘Hey, you can cook sustainably for cheap’ by doing different things like going to the farmer’s market,” Moussa said.
FDN co-director Olivia Keidl tells a similar story to Moussa in reflecting on her first venture to Slow Food.
"I started coming to FDN my freshman year first semester and it was really cool because I wasn't super into food or anything about Slow Food, local, sustainable, cooking nothing,” Keidl said. “Then I came here freshman year and I really got to try a lot of new things and learn a lot about that.”
For Keidl, the importance of Family Dinner Night goes beyond the education element of the evening.
“I like the family aspect of eating and the meals. Then the next semester after that I started working here,” Keidl said. “It's just a giant family."
The time at the beginning of the week to be with friends and eat food you can feel good about has a familial root with Moussa.
“My dad had a saying that goes, ‘A family that eats together stays together,’’’ Moussa said. “When I think food, I think family.”
