By Jillian Wrigley, news staff
Dozens of Northeastern students gathered last week with Boston residents in West Village F to learn about food in American culture at the Myra Kraft Open Classroom.
Four speakers, who are on the cutting edge of the food industry, came together to present their unique perspectives during the Jan. 18 class session called “What America Eats Today—And Why.”
Northeastern’s Myra Kraft Open Classroom series about food systems is a weekly seminar that is free to students and local residents. The series will hold seminars every Wednesday until April 19 that address sustainability, health and equality in food systems.
The open classroom series has run every semester since spring 2008, offering a four-credit course on a different theme each semester and featuring lectures from guest speakers. Professor of public policy Christopher Bosso, the main faculty member behind the program, said the program has previously discussed 15 different themes ranging from political elections to health care.
“This particular theme is a major research theme at the university,” he said. “Also, there are a lot of people in the Boston area I can tap as speakers. It has a very rich resource of people doing work in the food area.”
Former restaurateur Louisa Kasdon was the first speaker of the night. Kasdon is also the founder of Let’s Talk About Food, an organization dedicated to sparking food-centered conversations. She said America’s recent fascination with how food is prepared and where it comes from is a modern phenomenon that appeared over the past 15 years.
“If you had told me 20 years ago that there would be two networks dedicated to food and cooking, I couldn’t have imagined it,” Kasdon said. “People watch all these shows and watch them like they’re sporting events. Now the idea of being a chef, or owning a restaurant or even being a farmer has a lot of currency.”
Maureen Timmons, Northeastern’s director of dining services, pointed out the same pattern between individuals who were looking for higher standards in their meals at Northeastern. Timmons created a word cloud showing the key phases students were looking for in their dining halls, which was dominated by words such as cage-free, organic, vegan and sustainable.
The session also included a presentation by Anastacia Marx de Salcedo, the author of “Combat-Ready Kitchen,” who emphasized how technological advancements in military food rations pushed consumer food products to focus more on convenience and practicality.
“When I finished my book, my editor told me to estimate what the supermarket today would look like if the military hadn’t had this influence,” she said. “I ended up estimating it had produced at least 50 percent of the products in it.”
Andrew Levitt spoke about his plant-based meal kit delivery service Purple Carrot and the importance of making healthy cooking a routine.
“Sixty percent of customers [who buy meal kits] do it to save money, 59 percent do it to stay healthy and 55 percent do it to waste less food,” he said. “I think those three attributes are quite consistent with what meal kits are all about.”
Robyn Jaeger, a resident of Needham, Massachusetts who heard about the Myra Kraft series from a friend, said she was pleased with the university’s decision to open the seminar to the public for free.
“I think it’s phenomenal,” she said. “We’ve got Wellesley College near us, Babson, Olin, and none of them, I think, offer something like this. I think it’s amazing. I’m just really thrilled to not have to prepare for classes, but to gain such interesting information.”
Bosso said between university students and local retirees, the mix of people who attend the seminars every semester enhances the overall classroom experience.
“Boston has a great number of people who want to be intellectually challenged,” he said. “It’s a nice way for the students to hear from people in the audience and the community, and the people in the audience get to hear what the students these days are asking questions about and are interested in.”
Photo By Alex Melagrano
