We’re Nora and Kyle.
Hummus-addicts, bad singers, and sleep-deprived students at Brown University.
But, more importantly for this blog, we’re budding environmentalists. We understand that there are numerous and vast problems with the environment and lots of important work to do. We can’t do it all, but by focusing our attention on one aspect of the fight for a sustainable future, we believe that we can make a difference.
Our part is the local food movement.
By eating locally, carbon dioxide emissions are reduced, local businesses are supported, food safety is promoted, and often, the food just tastes better.
But, as poor college students, we get that it’s not easy – especially with a meal plan where the swipe of a card gets you all you can eat and bus systems to grocery stores might as well be written in Latin. Frankly, eating locally as a student can seem pretty impossible.
In this blog, we hope to help.
First, we’re going to attempt to quantify the exact effect that eating locally has on the environment versus eating on our school’s meal plan. We’ll be spending one day cooking and consuming local food, and one day eating in our school’s dining hall, the Ratty. On both days, we’ll document exactly what we consume in order to share it with you, as well as to track its environmental impact: how many miles that apple traveled to get onto our plates, its mode of transport, carbon footprint etc...
...But also how we feel about the whole experience. How convenient, expensive, time-consuming it is to eat locally versus in a dining hall. How our food tastes, the experience we have preparing it (and cleaning it up).
This is our experiment that we hope you’ll join us for. We’re pretty excited about it, but we also grasp that it’s just that – an experiment, and one that we probably won’t be able to replicate every single day.
So, while we go, in addition to our research, comments, and reflections, we hope to provide resources and advice, to those on Brown’s campus, other college students, and just people in general. Eating locally isn’t a switch you can just throw – at least not for more than a day – but we hope to explore how we can take small steps by changing our personal consumption habits and seeing just how large of an affect those tiny changes can have.
