Penn Dining and Bon Appetit bring back an extended Food Week

Do you know where your food comes from? Penn Dining and Bon Appétit Management Company hope to answer this question during their 6th annual Food Week.

From Monday, Oct. 19 to Thursday, Oct. 22, Penn Dining and Bon Appétit are partnering with University faculty and student groups to “bring awareness to the politics concerning the food,” said Bon Appétit’s Residential District Manager Stephen Scardina.

This year, Bon Appétit has expanded its programs from a single day to an entire week so that it can involve more students and bring more awareness to how students’ dining hall meals are prepared from start to finish.

“Bon Appétit has a whole host of environmental and socially responsible policies to address some of the concerns we see in the food systems,” East Coast fellow at Bon Appétit Sea Sloat said. “A lot of the policies are things that the students are interacting with every day by going to our dining halls, but [they] don’t necessarily know what the policies are or what the reasons behind those policies are.”

Events during this week will include an exhibition on how to maintain a plant-based diet — hosted by the Latino Coalition, Penn Vegan Society and Penn for Fair Food — and a screening of the film “Food Chains," followed by keynote speaker Susan Marquis.

Marquis is the dean of Pardee RAND Graduate School and authored the new book “I Am Not a Tractor!” Sloat says she will be “an invaluable resource in the room to get more information.” Other involved groups include the Urban Nutrition Initiative, Swipe Out Hunger and Penn’s “The Politics of Food” class.

The new additions to Food Week since last year included its partnership with the Latino Coalition, and Bon Appétit hopes to add more groups every year. “We are adding four groups into the fold here as we are rolling out the program,” Scardina said.

Bon Appétit wants to “show our well-being commitments and how we do healthy food from start to finish,” Bon Appétit’s resident registered dietitian Dan Connolly said. To participate in Food Week and see all that Penn Dining has to offer, RSVP on their website to reserve a spot.

“I think this is a really exciting,” Sloat said. “We have a really good healthy kind of balance between raising awareness of social issues and social impact and implications of how we eat.”

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