Real Food Challenge

There was recently an article on ecoSpace about the Real Food Challenge. The Real Food Challenge is geared toward colleges and universities, and it's really easy to get your school involved (or get connected with someone who's already doing something):

"Anna Lappe, author and co-founder of the Small Planet Institute is one of the founders of the Real Food Challenge. Anna is known for her work on issues of sustainability and speaks at universities throughout the country encouraging students to get involved in the nationwide campaign.

Real Food is food that is ethically produced, with fair treatment of workers, equitable relationships with farmers (locally and abroad), and humanely treated animals. It’s food that is environmentally sustainable – grown without chemical pesticides, large-scale mono-cropping, or huge carbon footprints. Real food is food that tastes good, builds community, and has the potential to inspire broad-scale social change.

Clearly the standards of food are being raised with this campaign. Real food is an infusion of many ideas regarding what sustainable food is, it is taking food beyond the tangible items we eat for lunch and examining the social responsibility inferred around the food choices we make. Implicit within this definition is the potential community growth we can experience through investing time and effort in finding out where are food is coming from and creating networks to source our own sustainably grown food.

The central goal of the Real Food Campaign is to re-direct at least 20% of all the food purchased by colleges and universities (currently 4 billion dollars) toward real food within 10 years."