My first interaction with Food Truth was with the “Clean Plate Club.” Last year as I was leaving the dining hall and went to clear my tray off, there were a number of students gathered around the compost bins. As I approached them, they smiled and ate the leftover food off my tray. The message of food waste was clear and undeniable.

Food Truth is one of the activist groups on campus that really makes things happen.  Here are just a few of the events that they’ve been part of this term:

• A panel on the Fair Trade movement with the chair of the econ department and several fair trade organizers
• Sending two students to Italy to participate in the Terra Madre Food Truth conference
• A dinner with Harvard anthropologist James Watson to discuss food related issues
• The Food Stamp Challenge

The Food Stamp Challenge asks students to eat a meal that costs just $1.96 (a meal at the dining hall costs something like $11). $1.96 is half of the daily stipend for the 29 million Americans who use food stamps. They provided peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at Sayles Hill.

I asked if they were going to do the “clean plate” club again and they responded, “Things that people really hate never last that long. We don’t want to encourage people to spit in our food.” It’s true that some of my friends were really upset by having someone eat their food. A more paletable approach may be removing the trays from dining halls. Other groups are working with Food Truth to encourage trayless dining. Until then we can just try to take a little less.

If you’re interested in joining Food Truth, you should attend one of their meetings Mondays, 9PM in upper Sayles. Or you could shout an email to Megan Hafner (hafnerm@carleton.edu).

Students making a meal at Farmhouse