Communal Meal with Grant Houses Residents

We have much to catch up on covering garden activity in the fall, so I'll provide a series of post covering different parts of the project from throughout the semester.

On November 15th, CUFSP and SCEG (Student Coalition on Expansion and Gentrification) members hosted a communal meal with residents at the Grant Houses. A recap of the meal follows, as well as pictures from the event. It was a great success, and our youth chefs were wonderful! Thank you to all the event sponsors, listed below.

Article published on the Columbia Univ. Office of Environmental Sustainability website:

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY FOOD SUSTAINABILITY PROJECT,GENERAL GRANT RESIDENTS SHARE HARVEST MEAL

Date: November 19, 2008

They gathered on Saturday, November 15, around tables at the General Grant Houses Community Center - Grant Houses residents and Columbia students - to celebrate many months of collaboration.
This time with a Thanksgiving feast they'd planned and prepared together.
The dinner was part of the Columbia Food Sustainability Project's much larger effort under way since last summer to develop a community garden on the grounds of the General Grant Houses. Working with the New York City Housing Authority and the Tenants Association, "we're trying to improve nutrition by gardening in the city and showing what kinds of food taste good and what can be used to cook in healthier ways," says Becky Davies, CC '10, who's been leading the project.
Davies says "we wanted to plan an event focused on the garden. The Thanksgiving dinner demonstrated how to cook with healthier, more sustainable food." The approximately 50 meal participants were invited because of their interest in the garden, the older crowd having become acquainted with it through the General Grant Senior Center and the Tenants Association, the young people through several CFSP-sponsored field trips they've taken this fall.
In the past few weeks, Davies says students had planning lunches in their dorm rooms with members of the Tenants Association. "These were really good," she says, "as the logic for the garden became tangible."
Sara Martin, president of the Tenants Association, says the dinner was a great success - "with everyone in there doing something." She describes a carrot soup "made from scratch," with Columbia student cooks and seven young helpers from the General Grant after-school program doing lots of "chop, chop, chop and slice, slice, slice" of onions and squash along with plenty of "wash, wash, wash"of collard greens.

Lots of the cooking was coordinated by Leslie Woodward, Chef at President Lee Bollinger's house, who found out about the CFSP at one of its recent on-campus garden harvest sales on College Walk. The turkeys and cornbread stuffings - one with turkey stock, one vegetarian -- cranberries and greens were Woodward's creations.
She says as the group sat around and talked, the evening "was relaxed, and felt like one big community with four and five generations involved. The cultural and economic diversity was really special."
Davies says the dinner participants were a particularly interesting group, even including a growing elderly population of Chinese immigrants interested in the possibility of a garden at Grant Houses. "They don't speak English," Martin says, "but we're still able to communicate."
Sarah Federman, BC '09, says it was a "great experience to have a meal we'd all made together." She describes sitting with "Clarence," a jazz singer, and describes her delight in being "in the neighborhood, outside the Columbia bubble. It's easy at times," she says,
"to forget Columbia is very much a part of Harlem."
Federman says "the meal is a great example of the feasibility of creating cohesive community with discourse. Also a community project such as the garden is a wonderful way to engage the community."

Funding and donations for the dinner came from numerous Columbia organizations, city agencies, local supermarkets and greenmarket venders.
For Sara Martin, who has lived in the Grant Houses for the 52 years they've been open, the collaboration and Columbia student outreach around the garden is a "first" for her. "And," she says, "I want to be as much a part of it as I can.
"We need to come together and talk about things," she says. "The world is big enough for us to live in peace, and compromise and sacrifice is what it's all about."