Statesman

Issue date: 5/6/09 Section: News

Media Credit: Joseph Olivieri Students and faculty dine in UMD's Food Court.

For UMD students Ashley Minnerath and Anna Radzak, a proposal to bring local and organic foods to UMD's Food Court and Dining Center turned into a research project on whether or not those foods would even sell if offered.

Minnerath and Radzak started their senior research project with the desire to bring organic foods to Duluth hospitals. They planned to use the UMD campus as a trial run in which to base their proposal. Over time, though, they found they would have more impact if they focused entirely on bringing these foods to UMD.

"We realized we had to concentrate on a smaller area, our original idea was too big to do in one semester," Radzak said.

During the course of their research, however, Minnerath and Radzak learned that UMD's Food Services is run independently from the college and funded by its own sales. They are restricted by what makes them profitable-by what sells.

"We didn't know this either until we started to research our project," Minnerath said.

With this knowledge, they set out to determine whether or not local and organic foods would actually sell if brought to UMD's Dining Center and Food Court.

The two sent out an Institutional Review Board approved survey to students, faculty and staff via e-mail to determine if they would buy these foods if they were offered on campus.

Preliminary survey results have shown that 78 percent of students eat at either the Food Court or Dining Center on campus regularly. Fifty three percent more, however, responded that they would eat there more often if local and organic foods were made available.

It was the survey e-mail that got the attention of Rebecca Covington, the head of MPIRG.

"It was perfect. We couldn't have planned it any better ourselves," she said.

At the time MPIRG was drafting four possible proposals for local sustainable agriculture. They planned to present one of these proposals in the Issues and Action meeting at Augsburg last Saturday. The meeting and proposal were to decide the statewide task

forces of next year.

Now, Minnerath and Radzak plan to work with MPIRG in sharing the data collected by the survey in order to have an impact on the University campus. Covington said that Duluth is a prime spot for beginning local and organic food initiatives.

"We are seeing Duluth as a whole take an interest in natural agriculture," she said.

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