Skip to Content, Navigation, or Footer.
Support the IDS in College Media Madness! Donate here March 24 - April 8.
Thursday, March 28
The Indiana Daily Student

arts

Big Red Eats Green food festival promotes environmental nutrition

entFood

Students’ regimented routes to class Wednesday afternoon took an interesting turn when the pathway before them transformed into a world of all things green.

The sidewalks surrounding the IU Eskenazi Museum of Art flooded with the color — from a bike that, when pedaled, blended green smoothies to a woman eating wild plantain straight from the grass at her feet.

The Big Red Eats Green food festival was open to anyone with a passion for nutritional sustainability and a desire to greenify Bloomington by whatever means they saw fit.

“I hope this just makes students think about their food choices more,” said Carissa Marks, senior and organizer of the event. “That’s the first step to changing perceptions and getting involved in the food aspect of living on campus and being a responsible consumer.”

As the food-working intern for the Office of Sustainability, Marks invited a diverse selection of local restaurants, organizations, charities and academic programs to participate in the festival and represent the spectrum that is Bloomington’s sustainability.

Each booth contributed one step that a morsel of food might take to be considered sustainable. From its planting and preparation to its distribution and disposal, the entire process could be mapped out to track a piece of kale’s journey through Bloomington.

After the Big Red Eats Green food festival ended at 3 p.m., the event transitioned into Big Red Eats Global, which Marks said was a new addition for the year.

During this time, Indiana Memorial Union chefs worked with international students and organizations to cook worldly foods with sustainable, local ingredients.

But with so many accounts of environmentally conscious nutrition, the festival also posed differing views of how both the campus and the city should better its sustainable practices.

For IU, sustainability is defined as a “balance between environmental health, economic prosperity and social equity,” according to the Office of Sustainability website.

For other groups like the Real Food Challenge, this definition is not enough. According to the Real Food Challenge 2016 Report, out of all IU campus food, only 3.83 percent is real food, or food that meets the group’s requirements of healthy and sustainable 
nutrition.

The group’s booth presented a petition to the University’s administration that asks it to change that percentage by signing the Real Food Campus Commitment.

“We’d like them to commit to sourcing from real food vendors, more local producers and also to require vendors to have transparency,” doctoral student and member Angela Babb said. “Most of the issue here is how hard it is to even get research. It’s hard to tell what’s going on — where are we getting those apples from?”

Other booths looked to improve Bloomington’s sustainability in more economic terms with their own businesses. These included vendors like Rainbow Bakery, Soma Coffee House and Juice Bar, Rasta Pops and LuckyGuy Bakery, which all sold fresh food made with local or sustainable ingredients.

Organizations such as the Rooftop Garden at Middle Way House and Crimson Cupboard, which both work to fight Bloomington hunger using environmentally friendly practices, focused on a different economic angle.

“Bloomington’s like a good, old-fashioned, southern Indiana town, except someone stuck a college campus right in the middle of it and that creates a lot of issues, especially when involving money,” senior and Rooftop Garden intern Spencer Clapp said. “Being sustainable costs money, but it then takes away some of those issues like not having enough resources or being hungry.”

Crimson Cupboard volunteer Linda Hadley said she also relates sustainability to giving food to those 
in need.

“Of course it can mean providing for others, because whenever we have extra at home from being sustainable, we have to think about how we can use it to help someone else,” she said.

From these various definitions of sustainable nutrition, most vendors said they thought IU and the city of Bloomington were considerably ahead of other communities in their environmental practices.

“Sustainability is definitely a lot more than reduce, reuse, recycle, especially here,” Clapp said. “It’s about passing on what you have to the next generation.”

Get stories like this in your inbox
Subscribe