Bon Appétit Management Company

Last week Bon Appétit Management Company cafés around the country celebrated 13th Annual National Farmworker Awareness Week (NFAW). As part of our efforts to make people think about who harvests their food, we asked students at colleges and universities to create a collage about why they support farmworker rights. Here’s how some thoughtful students from American University in Washington, DC; Goucher College in Maryland; and Emmanuel College in Boston finished this sentence: I support farmworker rights because…

Pizza is the No. 1 food among college students. What better way to get them cooking than teaching them how to make their own perfect pies? At Carleton College, Bon Appétit Sous Chef Gibson Price and the FireBellies student cooking club partnered up to practice DIY pizza making — from the dough to the sauce. Andrew Yang, class of 2015, joined them to document the culinary adventure.

Students at Carleton College in Northfield, MN, are already well-versed about the importance of sourcing food locally, but it’s not often they get to actually visit one of the farms that supplies the café and see first-hand what it means to run a family farm.

You’ve no doubt heard the phrase “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.”Well, a few students at Vanguard University in Costa Mesa, CA, got lemons and went way beyond lemonade to create desserts, sandwiches, salads, and more.

For Jewish college students following a kosher diet, meal times on campus can be daunting – unless they attend Washington University in St. Louis, MO, or Goucher College, in Baltimore, MD. These universities were ranked Nos. 1 and 3 by College Prowler as offering the best kosher dining options, and since College Prowler’s rankings are created “for students, by students,” prospective students can trust that these schools have got them covered.

With such student organizations as Farm Club, a brand-new cooking student organization headed by young Swedish chef Vayu Maini Rekdal, and Food Truth, considered the most active group on campus, it’s no wonder Carleton College students flocked to compete in the campus’s first annual Sustainable Iron Chef Competition, hosted by Bon Appétit Management Company in honor of the first national annual Food Day. Cooked up by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, Food Day is a movement for “real food” across the country.

Bon Appétit at Goucher College kicked off November with a new tradition for the campus: Iron Chef, college style. Representatives from each of the four classes—freshmen through seniors—were tasked with creating a delicious meal in a limited time frame not only for a panel of discerning judges, but for the entire café… during the dinner rush. That meant cooking not just for three or four, but for hundreds. Adding a whole new element to the competition, this certainly left the student competitors an appreciation of what kitchen staffs in college dining halls do three times a day, every day!

In certain circles, some farmers are as famous as rock stars. Bon Appétit Farm to Fork partner Al Courchesne of Frog Hollow Farm in Brentwood, CA, is one of them. Renowned Berkeley, CA, restaurateur Alice Waters has been known to serve his O’Henry peaches, Rainier cherries, Goldensweet apricots, and Warren pears unadorned for dessert at Chez Panisse. To learn why, I organized a tour of Al’s farm along with a group of 50 faculty members, staff, students, and Bon Appétit Sous Chef Cheylin Hale from Mills College in Oakland, CA.

How do you get a plugged-in, tweeting, Facebooking generation interested and involved in sustainable farming? University of Redlands in Redlands, CA, found an answer this year for Low Carbon Diet Day– appeal to their inner techie.

Redlands in California’s San Bernardino Valley has a rich agricultural heritage, having once been one of the area’s largest producers of citrus crops. The Redlands Conservancy seeks to preserve both the agricultural land and its heritage – goals Bon Appétit is proud to support.