UW Madison Gardens and Housing “Keeping it Local”

July 21, 2009

“A new local food initiative on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus is starting very close to home. For the first time this summer, UW Housing’s Dining and Culinary Services is sourcing some of its produce from a small plot in Allen Centennial Gardens on campus. Diners at Frank’s Place – the dining facility in Holt Commons – have been enjoying fresh greens, radishes and onions grown just a few hundred feet away, and some of the lettuce in the Babcock Dairy Store’s sandwiches and salads may have had a shorter trip to the store than the patron eating it.”

You can read more about this initiative in the full story by Jill Sakai of University Communications. This is a story with some close ties to In Defense of Food and Go Big Read. Monica Theis, a Food Science instructor who “assumed responsibility for the garden four years ago,” is participating in a Center for Biology Education faculty book group that has been hard at work developing and sharing approaches to using the book in courses. Monica is a great contributor to the planning that’s underway to assure rich discussions of the book throughout the year. Housing is a co-sponsor of Pollan’s visit, and it’s great to see how agile they are in implementing some of the principles in the book in our dining halls.

Finally, there couldn’t be a more beautiful setting than Allen Centennial Gardens. I would love to brighten up our sites with some supplemental photos if any amateur photographers would like to take photos, and the full story has some beautiful, captioned photos.

Sarah McDaniel