Learning to cook isn’t a skill students typically expect to acquire as a part of their Furman education, and cooking using sustainably grown local products is usually out of the range of most college student’s budgets.
But sophomore Monica Kraeger has been seeking to change all of that ever since she founded the Slow Food Furman following a two-week stay in Italy that that inspired her to bring the country’s slow food movement to campus.
“My host dad was getting his masters from the university where the movement started and had talked to me about what it stood for,” Kraeger said, adding that she was inspired by the global scale of the program and its promotion of a healthy lifestyle.
The slow food movement started in Italy to counteract the fast food movement after McDonalds tried to set up a chain in Rome in the 1980s. Since then, the movement has gone international with more than 100,000 members in 150 countries who seek to preserve traditional cuisine while using sustainably grown local products.
“I wanted to bring people together to talk about issues of food on a global scale,” Kraeger said, noting food’s important role in community building and bringing students together.
Furman is home to many organizations that promote healthy eating and good lifestyles including PHOKUS and the Cooking Club. Part of what makes Slow Food Furman unique is its emphasis on not only a healthy lifestyle but a sustainable one as well. Kraeger said that part of the goal of Slow Food Furman is to make students more aware of sustainable resources available to them, such as the Swamp Rabbit Trail, which can take students through downtown Greenville, and the discounted produce from the Furman Farm.
Kraeger hopes that the club will be able to engage in a variety of initiatives on campus to connect students with the local community as well as with other areas of the Furman campus. At the club’s first potluck meeting, members setting up stations around campus with Furman Farm produce, tastings of local farm and Furman farm produce, and recipe competitions in the Dining Hall.
“Understanding the relationships between farmer and people is a key takeaway point of the Slow Food movement and clubs that represent the movement,” Kraeger said.