Stanford University
IN-3: Innovation 3

The annual Stanford Food Summit is a gathering of experts on food-related issues and provides a catalyst for generating solutions to some of the nation’s and the planet’s most challenging and important crises. The first Food Summit, held in the fall of 2010, demonstrated the breadth and depth of interest in Food issues across the seven schools of the university (Medicine, Earth Sciences, Business, Humanities & Sciences, Law, Education, and Engineering). The target audience was primarily academics. The second and third Summits opened up the target audience to include community-based food groups/organizations, and included presentations of pilot collaborative research projects in the areas of Hospital Food, Food Bank Food, Farm to School Food, and Food Policy. The fourth Summit in 2013 provided a forum for focusing on Growing Pathways to Careers in Food Systems. This was in response to substantial input from Stanford students who wanted to learn more about the types of jobs and careers that are emerging in this dynamic area. More than two dozen speakers, many of them Stanford Alumni, discussed their jobs and careers in farming, food production, cooking, food procurement, food entrepreneurship/start-ups, food policy/social justice, and food and health. For more details, please visit: http://foodsummit.stanford.edu/

Positive and measurable outcomes associated with the various Food Summits at Stanford include the following: 1. Dining Hall Study As a result of a collaboration between Debra Dunn (who taught Stanford's Sustainable Abundance class), Stanford Dining, and postdoctoral fellow Christoper Gardner (Food Summit founder), a study was conducted in four of the undergraduate dining halls to try to improve the healthfulness of student dining choices. The paper was published in 2013. 2. Food Helix Because of the collegial and collaborative relationships fostered by the Food Summits, a group of 5 were selected by the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education (VPUE) to attend Faculty College during the 2012-2013 academic year to develop a Food Helix in response to recommendations from the Study of Undergraduate Education at Stanford (SUES Report). The group has just been granted over $3,000 by the VPUE to initiate the implementation of the Food Helix. 3. Summer Farm Camp During an afternoon breakout session of the first Food Summit in 2010, a Community-Academic partnership was started between Full Circle Farm (11-acre organic farm on the grounds of Peterson Middle School in Sunnyvale) and Stanford. Together the groups created a summer camp program that has enrolled over 100 children each of the last two years (the first year they enrolled ~80 kids). Three students have received Haas summer fellowships, seven students have received Human Biology HB-REX summer fellowships, and one student has received a CCSRE summer fellowship to be camp counselors/field researchers at the camps. This coming summer will mark the 4th consecutive year of this Community-Academic partnership. Three summer camp counselors wrote a manuscript covering the results of the 2011 farm camp. That manuscript is under review by the Journal of Nutrition Education and Communication. 4. Funds Raised by the Food Summits Each of the first four Summits were funded by combinations of the Provost, the deans of the seven Stanford schools, the Woods Institute, and a few others. The funds raised each year have been in the range of $50,000/year. As a result of the visibility the Food Summit has brought to this topic and the outstanding scholars involved, various donors have contributed unrestricted gifts totaling $136,000 that have been used to fund the scholarly work done at Full Circle Farm Summer camp, Second Harvest Food Bank (see below), and other projects. 5. Collaboration with Second Harvest Food Bank Drs. Randall Stafford and Lisa Goldman Rosas were awarded funds from the unrestricted gifts described above to work with Second Harvest Food Bank in working to optimize their organizational transition to providing more produce to the hungry people that they serve in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties. A summary of this work was presented at the 2012 Food Summit 3. 6. New course created: Healthy and Sustainable Food Systems. This quarter Professor Christopher Gardner started a new class (Hum Bio 113S) that arose directly from all the work he has done with colleagues for the past few years on topics covered at the Food Summits. The course includes a number of guest speakers who are being primarily drawn from the colleagues that he has met and worked with over the last four years of Summits.