Co-designing a New NU Class for Fall 2013
This week I had a meeting with the dining hall director of Northeastern as well as Chris Bosso, a professor in public policy, about a new class we are creating for the fall. Since Northeastern signed onto the Real Food Challenge (see my blog post here to learn what that is and hear how we won the campaign), the first step is determining what percentage of “real food” the dining hall currently purchases. In order to do this, the Real Food Challenge developed the Real Food Calculator, which is used to categorize each food as “real” or not. Running the calculator means analyzing the invoices of the countless products purchased by dining services, so it’s a big task! Part of the process is also to develop more sustainable, fair, humane, community-based purchasing alternatives that both satisfy our goals and fit within the budget.
The class will most likely be a 5000-level research-based directed study and will be mostly centered around running the calculator. To see this project as an actual for-credit class at Northeastern is so exciting! It will be a very interesting opportunity to learn the nitty-gritty details required to make big institutional changes in the food system. Northeastern signing onto the Real Food Challenge is a major development in the university-based food movement because we are the largest private school in the country to have signed on, the first school in Boston, and the largest contract with Chartwell’s (the subcontracted company that runs the dining hall). Our yearly operating budget is $40 million! By the time the calculator is completed and the commitment plan is implemented, we will have helped shift $8 million (20% of the budget) into a fair, sustainable food system. Such an exciting time to be involved in this movement!
Sustainably Yours, Catherine 
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