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Good Food Folks: Kendall Singleton
Sustainability coordinator at the University of Virginia.By the gastro.gnomes
Kendall Singleton was a student at the University of Virginia when she saw the potential for change in her campus dining halls, and essentially created a job for herself by heading up an effort to transform them. We’re pretty sure she’s leading the way for what will eventually become the norm in campus eateries everywhere.
What attracted you to a good food job? I first became interested in and involved with Dining Services out of a concern for the waste that a university dining operation created. I quickly began to realize that the inputs (the food) were just as, if not more, important in evaluating a dining program’s environmental footprint. Right around the same time I became a more active participant in Charlottesville’s local food movement, and through frequenting farmers markets and befriending producers, I came to see that the heart of this movement was about building communities. Once I had found a niche in that emerging community, there was no going back. How did your previous work or life experience prepare you for a good food job? My experience as a student at UVA was good preparation for my job today: I’m not so far removed from understanding what gets them excited and passionate, and how to channel that enthusiasm towards effecting positive changes in our dining program. Additionally, spending a season working on a small, family-run organic vegetable farm was an invaluable experience in learning about the nitty gritty details of stewarding the land and nourishing people, work that had previously been largely theoretical to me. I certainly don’t take food for granted or view it the same way after having been one of the laborers actually harvesting the bounty out in the field for those eight months. What advice do you have for others in search of a good food job? Be willing to get your hands dirty! Knowing at least something about food cultivation is crucial in this field. Secondly, simply by being an active member of your local food community, you’ll meet lots of like-minded people. Keep in touch with them — you never know when those contacts might come in handy, be it as a reference or even job-offer-er. If you could be compensated for your work with something other than money, what would it be? I’d love to be compensated with a chance to travel and explore farmland and food communities throughout the world. Getting to see and experience such a wide array of production methods and exotic tastes would be an unparalled source of inspiration — though I might not make it back home! |
safe food
I am a person who is highly allergic to pesticides and processed foods and when a person who is in need, none of the local pantries will not accomodate me, and food stamps do not go far enough when all must be organic only. I stick with my strict diet, of organic only though as it would cost my health. I fast and make the days spread out. I can get organic carrot tops and beet tops to cover me until I can get variety again. the local farmers would not accomodate me and local organic farmers would not either.
I spent two months trying to communicate with them and they simply did not comply. one 4 hours away said I could come help him, but it was not time for me to move away yet.
I wanted to thank you for starting what it sounds like I had invisioned helping myself. I want to help start apprenticeship programs for middle school students, and organic local farming should be one of them. students will be out of trouble if they were busy learning working skills, in middle school, and take the science out of the classroom and into the community and create jobs that way and rebuild the smaller community again only better. when students are given opportunity to make food from soil up and eat healthy safe food organic only, they will appreciate their food, and do better in school, and less diseases, as well as know that food does not come from a peice of plastic in some attractive wrapping. it will give them a purpose and a place in society other than being babied. when middle school students learn and physically work at something, they feel better about themselves and learn better who they are and could become in a better light.
it would also teach better choices, and understand how other countries who refuse to let genetic food in their country and junk foods out of their schools are much better advances in everything and will hopefully see how they want to do better to be among the better students in America for a change.
I appreciate your Good Food jobs, if it is organic solutions and common sense mentality.
thank you
ms kay
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