Bon Appétit Management Company

A group of Hamilton College students in Clinton, NY, noticed that a lot of food was being left on students’ plates at the end of meals. Led by Real Food Hamilton, the school’s Real Food Challenge (RFC) chapter, they set out to raise awareness among their peers about how much they waste and why it matters.

One wonders how we ever ended up where we are today. We never voted or ever had a conscious say on the transformation of agriculture from what it used to be to what it has become.

Of the 600,000 food products sold in U.S. supermarkets, 80% have added sugar. By 2050, 1 in 3 Americans will have diabetes. Those are just a few of the sobering soundbites from Fed Up, a powerful new film that Bon Appétit is proud to support and which promises to change the conversation about diet and exercise in America.

Bon Appétit and Biola University partnered for Creation Stewardship Week, a celebration to remind students and faculty of the responsibilities humans have to the planet and how personal decisions affect the world around us.

This Thursday, we’re asking guests at our 500-plus locations to “Meat in the Middle” when it comes to food choices and climate change.

Every day, Americans take the abundance and low cost of our food supply for granted. Ironically, farmworkers — those whose lives are spent harvesting the fruits and vegetables we eat — can rarely afford to purchase them.

Bon Appétiters love what they do — and so opening the kitchen doors for behind-the-scenes tours is one of their favorite activities. On a weekday afternoon not long ago, several Northern California teams shared their passion with a group of enthusiastic middle school kids.

On Tuesday, September 24, all of our 500-plus cafés will offer a 100% local meal — everything from oils to grains to spices and sweeteners must be sourced from within 150 miles. The only foreigner allowed is salt. Some locations get a little loco and offer a 100% local menu — multiple all-local dishes!

Bon Appétit General Manager Katie McKenna opened the doors to the Carleton East dining hall, where local middle school students embarked on a from-scratch pizza adventure taught by Sous Chef Gibson Price. The class included a fair amount of dough throwing (the approved kind) but also more serious topics, including tours of the full-scale industrial kitchen, a visit to the bakers (who offered delicious granola bars), and fruitful conversations about college life.

This is the third post in a series about Piper’s Epic Spring Semester Road Trip: Read #1, Setting Out on a Biofueled Road Trip through BAMCO Territory; #2 Veggie Oil-Fueled Adventures in Colorado; or about my traveling companion – my vegetable oil car Charlene.

Kevin and I, standing by Oberlin’s Real Food Campus Committment for 40%