BrainFeeders, a student organization in Falk College’s Food Studies program, is working to establish long-lasting food access and justice programs throughout the SU/ESF campus. The group is partnering with Common Threads CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) to have SU’s first-ever CSA drop off location on campus, which started in August. BrainFeeders has also partnered with the Student Association to provide free transportation from campus to the Regional Market on Saturdays in the fall. View schedule for Regional Market Shuttle. BrainFeeders’ faculty advisor is Professor Rick Welsh, who is department chair of Public Health, Food Studies and Nutrition.
The Daily Orange recently highlighted the BrainFeeders student organization. Click here to read the full article.
In the article, students mention FST 403–The Human Right to Adequate Food and Nutrition, which is a course in the food studies undergraduate core. This class introduces the international human rights legal framework into the food system, with relevance both in the national and international context. According to Professor Anne Bellows, director of the graduate program in Food Studies who teaches this course, “the point is to understand human rights as a(n additional) legal and practical strategy in addressing challenges and contradictions in the food system. The universality and interdependence aspects of human rights mean that we can and must insist on a democratic system that endows us with the political and civil rights to demand our economic, social and cultural rights, including the human right to adequate food and nutrition. Simplified, we have the legal right to engage with others and the state to imagine and work toward ever evolving and (hopefully) improving visions of what human rights, like the right to adequate food and nutrition, can be. This is one way of understanding that activist engagement is powerful.
Professor Bellows adds, “the transformative potential (e.g. through public interest civil society engagement) inside human rights has relevance beyond food studies majors. The interdependence and indivisibility of human rights (e.g., you cannot realize the right to adequate food and nutrition without human rights of free speech, assembly, health care, decent work, as well as women’s rights, children’s rights, disability rights, the rights of indigenous peoples, etc.) means that learning about human rights legal frameworks in the food system has relevance beyond food studies.