The Wisconsin Alumni Student Board (WASB) collaborated with student organization Slow Food UW to host “Food For Thought” at The Crossing on October 23rd, providing a free, homemade meal and discussion on food insecurity.
Food For Thought — this semester’s collaboration between Slow Food UW and WASB — serves as an initiative to raise awareness around ongoing food insecurity locally and globally, as well as how students and other members of the Madison community can improve access to healthy, nutritious food.
The event provided a free, locally-sourced meal and invited people to listen to a panel of University of Wisconsin-Madison students and faculty members discuss improving food security and food justice.
WASB members Annie Lysek, Chloe Kelm and Grace Duffrin helped plan and host Food For Thought this semester, working with the Slow Food UW team to develop the menu and execute it for more than a hundred people in attendance. The three led the panel discussion, normally unique to Slow Food UW events, guiding the conversation to explore the panelist’s knowledge and expertise on food insecurity and ways to combat it.
The discussion between panelists, friends and strangers made the event feel “like a more casual family dinner,” Kelm said. She added that “food brings community…and Slow Food is a great place to bring that.”
The panel consisted of Claudia Calderón, a faculty associate in the Department of Horticulture who specializes in agroecology, sustainability, climatic resilience and food security, Adena Rissman, a professor in the Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology and affiliate of many other related departments and Anna Englebert, a WASB member and the student voice on the panel.
During the discussion, Calderón spoke about her definition of food security and the fact that in Dane County, 10% of residents face food insecurity. “You are food secure if you have access to healthy [food] and enough food,” she said, adding that being secure is “not someone who has to eat from a [food] pantry.”
Rissman mentioned some ongoing political factors that have changed the agricultural landscape of the country, such as tariffs and the shutdown.
Calderón added that when trying to solve food insecurity, “the cost would be some of the biggest barriers.”
Panelists offered several initiatives to help combat food insecurity and food injustice, like The People’s Farm, a UW-Madison student organization shouted out by Anna Englebert, grass-fed animal farms as mentioned by Adena Rissman and going to restaurants that strive on having homemade food and locally-sourced ingredients such as Marie’s Soul Food and Salvatores.
“We need to revalue traditional knowledge around food systems,” Calderón said, adding that many have forgotten about traditional Native American foods that are being marginalized by current pressures to reduce crop diversity on farms.
Englebert agreed, mentioning the importance of remembering Native American food culture and "integrating indigenous knowledge into how we grow food.”
Calderón also said around 40% of the food gets wasted in the US food system. Calderón added a solution to the mix, saying that “If we eat in season, the prices are going to be low.”
The menu for the event reflected the panel discussion and the values surrounding locally sourced, homemade food. It featured an apple and leek salad with flavored butters for an appetizer, a main course of coconut curry with rice, pavlova with fruit for dessert and rosemary lavender iced tea for a beverage.
To ensure locality and seasonality, the hosts were involved in sourcing the meal’s ingredients.
“We walked through the farmers market with giant tote bags full of like 35 tomatoes, nine cabbages, some lemongrass, and then we went to Willy Street Co-op,” Duffrin said. “I was really excited to go through, dealing face-to-face with the farmers that we were buying from.”
Lysek confirmed the emphasis on locally-sourced ingredients affected the menu options. “If there were certain things that are out of season, we wouldn’t put that on our menu,” she said.
Later in the night, when it came time to make and serve the pavlovas, Duffrin said she and the other volunteers struggled. “The pavlova was not working out for some reason in our original way of going about it. As soon as I got here, Callie was like ‘Can you go buy more egg whites’ and I was like ‘Of course I can,’” she said. “Having that relationship where we have spent maybe nine hours together total and just being able to rely and trust in each other that we were gonna plan a beautiful event.”
The decision to bring out the dessert later on instead of getting the full meal right away was a deliberate choice, meant to get people to stay and listen to what the panelists were talking about, an initiative that proved successful.
Lysek reflected on what food justice and security means to her. “I think it’s so easy to take for granted how convenient or inexpensive food might be for us,” she said. “There’s a grocery store in the middle of campus, and we have the privilege of dining halls, but I think it’s important to take a step back and realize how a lot of people in the world don’t have that.”
Kelm agreed, adding the event felt more poignant given how social media has affected food culture norms.
“From a woman’s perspective, there’s a lot of things that were fad in terms of diet culture and exercise culture,” she said. “Something I love about this event is that it proves that food does bring individuals together, and it is important to feed your bodies, especially with healthy ingredients, but at the bare minimum, feeding your bodies food that can sustain you throughout the day.”
Slow Food UW has worked with other groups in the past, such as Roamin’ with Ramen, the Mercile J. Lee Scholars Program, UW Peace Corps, Delta Sigma Psi business fraternity and the UW Office of Sustainability. Most of the time, though, they host two low-cost, homemade meals at The Crossing weekly. Family Dinner Night is held every Monday at 6:30 p.m. as a meal that includes an appetizer, entree and a dessert all for $6 to $8. Their other meal is a lunch option, Café, held every Wednesday at noon with meal prices between $7 and $9.
