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The Campus Kitchens Project wipes out hunger and food waste

Hunger SummitThe Campus Kitchens Project, in partnership with Food Recovery Network, will host the first Food Waste and Hunger Summit on April 5 and 6. For 10 years Campus Kitchens has been leading the fight against hunger in the Evanston area. This track record was instrumental in selecting NU as the host site for the Summit. The Summit hopes to educate a diverse group of over 300 students and leaders in the non-profit community with dozens of speakers and breakout sessions on topics relating to food waste and fighting hunger.

The Campus Kitchens Project is a leader in community service for hunger relief. There are 34 Campus Kitchen programs across the country, where student volunteers recover food from cafeterias and deliver meals to the community. 

The Associate Director of Training and Evaluation at the Campus Kitchens Project, Laura Belazis, believes that college students provide the insight and creativity that can end hunger in America. “Today’s college students know that it’s wrong to waste 40 percent of our food when 1 in 6 Americans goes hungry,” she states. “We can’t keep rehashing the tactics of the past to address hunger today; we need to develop new solutions to get at the root causes of hunger, get ahead of the problem, and wipe it out,” said Belasiz.

The summit will feature two keynote speakers: Robert Egger, founder of DC Central Kitchen and the Campus Kitchens Project, and Jonathan Bloom, author of American Wasteland and food waste blogger. Egger will speak about fighting hunger with volunteer organizations and Bloom will discuss his work on food waste and what we can do to prevent it.