Students embrace Earth Day with VegFest

Real Food Hopkins and Students for Environmental Action (SEA) teamed up to host VegFest 2015, which featured pairs of students and professional chefs cooking with fresh vegetables. The event took place as part of the Earth Day celebrations on the Beach on Wednesday.

Sophomore Caroline McCown was the SEA member charged with organizing VegFest. This event aligned with the goal of SEA, which McCown described as encouraging students to live more sustainably.

“[The goal was] to promote student awareness about working to be more sustainable, to promote green ways of living and to have an awareness about being more sustainable,” McCown said. “[It’s about] being aware of climate change and actions that you can take as an individual or with your friends and [making] it not seem so dogmatic like ‘turn off your lights.’”

Junior Noah Erwin, a member of the board of Real Food Hopkins and a member of SEA tasked with planning VegFest, explained some of the reasons he believed students would attend the event, particularly focusing on food.

“I think on the simple level it’s going to be good food. It’s going to open up people to new types of food and new experiences that I think most people probably haven’t had,” Erwin said.

“Global meat production is one of the utmost carbon emitters worldwide,” he said, “and so if people can eat vegetables more often and scale back on what they need that comes from animals, this is both the small ‘It’s going to taste good’ and the holistic, ethical question.”

Erwin said one goal of Real Food Hopkins is to inform students of the value of sustainable food. They do this through efforts such as the community garden they run and the 100 Mile Meal. This meal is an event in the fall when Real Food Hopkins organizes and plans a dinner where everything is grown within 100 miles of campus.

According to Erwin, another goal of Real Food Hopkins is to hold the administration accountable for a sustainability pledge that was signed recently.

“We work to hold the University accountable to the Real Food Campus Commitment, which we signed a year and a half ago, where the University pledged that by 2020, we’ll have 35 percent of our food sourced from sustainable sources, whether that’s local or ecologically sound or humane or fair,” Erwin said.

Real Food Hopkins tries to educate students on sustainable eating in a fun way by highlighting different aspects of vegetables. According to Erwin, Real Food Hopkins puts emphasis on the root vegetables. McCown said the event was an exciting way for students to learn about vegetables in an interactive fashion.

“We’re bringing together some people who work in dining at Hopkins and some chefs from outside, and then we’re going to pair them with students and they’re going to cook a vegetable. They’re going to bring in local vegetables, and they’re going to do a cook-off,” McCown said. “Vegetables are more sustainable than meat. And then also, it’s a fun way to get students to interact with people who work in dining.”

McCown explained that SEA and Real Food Hopkins were the perfect partners for this event due to their rapport with JHU Housing and Dining and their similar sustainability goals. Real Food Hopkins has a close relationship with Dining, and they also had some of the resources to host the event.

Erwin also shared why Real Food Hopkins chose to partner with SEA.

“SEA was planning to do something similar, and so we sort of partnered with them and did some back-and-forth talking. I had the idea of just chefs, and they had the idea of just students, so we said ‘Hey, let’s combine them and have it be chefs and students,’” Erwin said. “We knew that SEA would be a great partner.”