UNITE HERE is excited to be an official partner of the first national Food Day. Food Day seeks to bring together Americans from all walks of life to push for healthy, affordable food produced in a sustainable, humane way.

We’ll be celebrating Food Day by hosting and participating in events on college campuses across the United States. The events – held at multiple locations in Baltimore, Boston, Connecticut, Chicago, and the Los Angeles area – will bring together food workers with students, faculty, and community food organizations, creating an opportunity for participants from diverse backgrounds to cook, eat, talk, listen and learn from each other about how to improve our food system.  Below are the key events:

Harvard University (Cambridge, MA)

As part of Food Day, Harvard food workers and students will launch the Harvard Sustainable Food Project to push for more sustainable food and jobs at the university.  Students and food worker will bake bread together, highlighting the university’s decision to close its in-house bakeshop several years ago.  Following the “breaking of bread,” workers, students and a representative of Real Food Challenge will have a panel discussion about moving food sustainability forward at Harvard.

October 26 @ 8:30For more information, please contact Brooks Bitterman at [email protected]

Pomona College (Claremont, CA)

Pomona College food service workers will join with university students to prepare and cook a local sustainable afternoon meal (Pappardelle with Ricotta and Swiss Chard) using ingredients from the Pomona College Organic Farm and local farmers market. In addition, participants will engage in a discussion about food security and sustainability on and off campus. Sponsored by UNITE HERE Local 11, Workers for Justice, Pomona Students for Environmental Activism and Responsibility (PEAR) and the Pitzer Eco Center. Speakers at the event will include Bob Gottlieb, co-author of the book Food Justice and Director of the Urban Environmental Policy Institute, and Frank Douglass, a Yale University cook and recently-elected New Haven Alderman.

October 24 @ 4:00 pm
For more information, please contact Jessica Choy at [email protected]

Northwestern University (Chicago, IL)

Exciting events will be happening at Northwestern University throughout the week of Food Day, including gardening, a film screening and a community forum. Members of UNITE HERE Local 1 representing different workplaces from Chicago’s food service industry will join students, Northwestern’s Sodexo management and two chefs from Evanston restaurants to discuss the real food movement and its connection to campus, jobs, and Chicagoland communities. Following the discussion, members of UNITE HERE will lead tours of one of Northwestern’s largest kitchens to give attendees a better sense of how campus food service works day-to-day.

October 24 @ 6:00 PM
For more information, please contact Kyle Schafer at [email protected]

New Haven, CT

On October 24, workers, students, and parents will come together to cook, eat, and learn about sustainable food at Yale and the New Haven Public School system (NHPS). In the morning, members of Local 35 and Local 217, which represent food service workers at Yale University and New Haven Public Schools, respectively, Yale undergraduates, and New Haven students will tour Yale kitchens and NHPS cafeterias. In the afternoon, Yale’s chef Stu Comen will teach a cooking class, using a recipe from Yale Dining and locally-sourced ingredients. At 5:00 pm, participants will share the meal, and at 6:30 food service workers and students active in the sustainable food movement will speak in a panel on real food and real jobs in New Haven. Yale University and New Haven Public Schools have both developed programs to bring more healthy, local, and sustainable food into school cafeterias and dining halls. Speakers will include student and worker leaders, as well as Tyisha Walker, cook’s helper in Yale’s dining halls and alderwoman elect for Ward 23.

October 24 @ 6:30 PM
For more information, please contact Rachel Payne at [email protected]

John Hopkins University (Baltimore, MD)

John Hopkins University (Baltimore, MD) UNITE HERE workers will be supporting the efforts of students from Real Food Hopkins, a campus chapter of the national Real Food Challenge, at Johns Hopkins University by helping them prepare their 100 Mile Meal (a meal sourced from food that is bought from local growers, producers and bakers who live within a 100 mile radius of the campus). Food service workers will be helping students in the kitchen to prepare the meal, and will be going out to meet local farmers who will be supplying the food.

October 29 @ 5:00 PM
For more information, please contact [email protected]

Loyola Marymount University (Los Angeles, CA)

Loyola Marymount University faculty, workers, and students will join together to discuss why workers in all levels of the food production chain deserve better treatment, and why it is essential to include workers when discussing the sustainability movement. After listening from experts in the field and workers’ testimonies, panelists will call the audience to action so that they can bring awareness to this issue not only on-campus, but in our greater Los Angeles community.

October 24

Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT)

Students and UNITE HERE Local 217 campus food workers are hosting "Crisp Talk: Food Stories from Different Perspectives." The event will feature apple crisp made the night before by students and workers using apples from a local orchard.  At the discussion, attendees will hear stories from Local 217 member and Wesleyan food service worker, Raquel Baptiste, as well as Wesleyan student and food activist, Manon Lefevre. Also speaking will be a local apple grower and Bon Appetites’ production chef, Ernie Arroyo. Remarks will be followed by a Real Food Challenge training exercise and discussion of where we go from here.

October 27 @ 5:30 PM

For more information, please contact Ellen Thomson at [email protected]

Check out Real Food Real Jobs for more information.