Big Red Eats Green

Big Red Eats Green is a unique campus fair that brings together local restaurants and community organizations working toward sustainability in order to educate students and to spread awareness of opportunities to get involved in the campus and community. 

I enjoyed chatting with a number of representatives from various community organizations such as the Bloomington Community Orchard, Hoosier Hills Food Bank, Sprouts and many others. The students present seemed happy and interested in gathering information from the organizations. I was a little confused as a visitor as to what qualified each of the represented restaurants to be there. Was the criteria just that they were local, or were the participants limited to those that used sustainable practices as well? I looked for signage but came up dry. 

The most interesting part of the fair for me was a conversation I had with a member of an organization that focuses on increasing the amount of locally grown food available through RPS and in the campus food halls. He mentioned that though IU claims that ~30% of its food procurement is locally sourced, the majority of these 'locally sourced' items are not actually food product, but cardboard packaging. My 'facts' are not really facts, and just came from casual conversation with an organization member but I would be curious to know what the true facts are. He had worked within the system for years trying to convince IU to modify its food contracting so he seemed pretty reliable.

He also mentioned that the number one item sold on campus is bottled water. A little alarming when all of campus is thoroughly inundated with drinking fountains. Imagine how many of those purchased bottles end up in the trash rather than the recycling, or as we discussed in class, part of the 1,500 lbs of litter picked up every day on the IU campus.