 So Debra Dunn, associate professor at the Stanford D. School, D for Design, that's where she spearheads classroom and project work in design for sustainable abundance. I love that word. With an emphasis on food, her first career was in business where she enjoyed a broad 22 year career at Hewlett Packard, fueled by her commitment to produce positive social impact concurrently with good business results. Since leaving her role as Senior VP of Global Citizenship at HP, she's been focused on tapping into the power of business, the passion of social entrepreneurs, and the creativity unleashed by design thinking to increase social justice and environmental sustainability. A year, let's see, when is this? More than a year ago, we held our first meeting to think about having a food summit and she was there. She was there at the very first meeting and she's been with this ever since and she has a really exciting project to describe to you today. Please welcome Debra Dunn and her panel. Good morning, everyone. It's great to see such a good turnout for this discussion of what I think is a really exciting group of projects. So what I wanna talk about today is Stanford as a living lab promoting sustainable food. And I wanna start by talking a little bit about what this approach is about. What is the foundation that it's built on? Because we're gonna talk about two specific projects today. But I think all of us on the panel feel that Stanford as a living lab has huge potential. There are many more things that we could do in the area of food. And so we're hoping in part to get all of your minds thinking about what the possibilities are so that this work can continue to expand. So essentially, the work is built on a foundation that consists of three pillars. One is collaboration, collaboration across campus, which is the situation with the first project we'll talk about. Collaboration with the community and other schools, as is the case in the second project, collaboration could really occur at any level. The second is innovation. So this is really about coming up with new ideas, new approaches, new ways of doing things. And it's built on a foundation of academic excellence. The first panel I think really demonstrated amazingly well the talent and the capacity of Stanford students. Every year it amazes me what the students in our classes are able to do in a relatively short period of time. And so we're trying to tap into that energy and capability of students, into the incredible research capabilities of the faculty, as well as the post-doctoral scholars. So we really have a lot of strength to build on. So to extend this theme a little more, we think there are some unique assets here that we are trying to tap with these projects. One is the Stanford brand, the students I already mentioned. We have a dining service with a deep focus on sustainability and food education, which is an incredible asset and resource. And finally, from my area of the campus, we have a D-school, a design school, that really is a leader, we believe we're a global leader, in innovation and user-centered design. And we're trying to deploy all of these assets. So I'm going to spend just a minute highlighting this design process that will be featured in the first project that we're talking about. I'm going to talk about it at a very high level. It's really built around three key elements, empathizing with the users you're trying to develop solutions for. So this is about really engaging deeply. In this case, with students and trying to understand how they think, what their needs are, what really motivates them. And I think you'll see in Michelle's description of her team's project and the brief description of the other team's project that we rolled out, this is at a deeper level than is typical. The second element is ideation. Trying to really focus on getting out of the box and coming up with creative ideas and things that are, in some cases, very far field that you might initially think that's crazy. We could never do that. We really encourage that kind of thinking and we use all kinds of techniques to cultivate it. And finally, and critically, prototyping. And I think this is the wonderful opportunities, this is a wonderful opportunity in doing these projects with the dining service. We're all about coming up with rough solutions and really trying them, putting them in front of users, in this case, students, seeing what happens and then engaging the students as co-creators in the process of coming up with a great solution. And I think the possibilities in terms of Stanford as a living lab in that arena are huge. And the goal is to delight users with wonderful solutions that they really resonate with and that they really wanna take advantage of. So we have started with two initial projects. The first is now in the phase of scaling and that project is focused on influencing students' food choices now and through their lives. And the second project with which Jenny will talk about is just really getting started. So in a little bit earlier phase, its focus is using Stanford's buying power and influence to improve transparency and develop objective standards for food suppliers. So you can see they're focused at slightly different levels with different groups of collaborators. So I'm delighted today to have a terrific panel to talk to you about this. Matt Roth is the Sustainable Food Program Manager in Stanford Dining and really a major engine of this work, he brings a great background from the sustainable food industry. Michelle Parrator is a student at the business school and co-president of the Farm Club, which is a club that was founded last year. She has a very deep interest in food. Ariana McClain is a postdoctoral scholar at the medical school and brings tremendous experience in food research from various perspectives, particularly trying to research in various interventions, trying to change eating behaviors. And Jenny Balasubramanian is a senior, an undergrad, one of the most dynamic, energetic, productive undergrads I have ever met, I have to say, and chair of the food cabinet, a student council focused on food. So I wanna start with Matt. And Matt, I teach your slide a little earlier, a little early here, but it provokes people to think about how you might be thinking about why do this work? Why is the dining service investing in this? I'm sure we've all had belt tightening initiatives with the economic downturn. I'm sure that's true too, and yet the dining service is investing in your position in a lot of activities. What do you see as the benefits of doing this kind of work for your organization, for the dining service, for the contribution that you make to the campus? Sure, yeah, thanks, Deborah. So I managed a sustainable food program for Stanford Dining. Stanford Dining is housed within residential and dining enterprises, just to put that into context, we're a self-operated food service provider, which means that we are employees of the university. So the stated mission of our organization, RNDE, is to support the academic mission of the university. And I think what we're finding through this work, which is to say this highly collaborative work that we're doing with you and others, with students on campus, is that not only are we able to support the academic mission of the university, but we're actually able to actively participate in it, which is, I think, fairly innovative for a food service provider of our size doing what we're doing here. In terms of the value that that returns to the organization, I think about it in a couple ways. One is certainly in the short term, and we're talking about these two projects, we've got the one where we're using food education to influence student behavior. We're hoping to change consumption in a way that students are eating a more healthy and sustainable diet. And then on the other side, we're working on the supply chain and trying to understand a little bit better where our food's coming from, what are the impacts that we're having, not only in terms of the environmental impact of our food, but also the socioeconomic side of that. And then combined together, the result is that as an organization, we are able to, hopefully, and I think we're doing this, reduce our impact, our footprint as an organization on the food system. Now, to the extent that our organization is committed to measuring, tracking, reporting, and ultimately setting goals for the organization to reduce our impact over time, I think that this work is critically important to making that happen. In the long term, and I put this statistic together earlier today, maybe we can throw it up on the screen here. So I calculated last year that if you think about the students in our dining halls, when they graduate from Stanford, they will collectively consume about 200 million meals in their lifetimes. And so what that means to me is that we have an enormous opportunity here by way of food education to influence their food behaviors in a way that's going to improve their health and wellness over time, and that is going to ultimately impact the food system in a positive way. And for me personally, as I think about this, it feels as much like an obligation as anything to the extent that we are sending these students out into the world to deal with the food system that is broken. And I think we have the opportunity here to give them the skill sets, the knowledge, to deal with what they're gonna inevitably have to deal with. So Matt, did the initial impetus for your role and this work come from the management of the food service? Do you have such enlightened management that they said, wow, we really have to worry about sustainability, or did it come from the students? Where did that energy come from? Yeah, it was definitely a combination of both. So Eric Montell, my boss, the executive director of Stanford Dining and his boss, Shirley Everett of R&D, I think certainly saw this opportunity, saw it really as an opportunity to participate, as I said, in the academic mission of the university. But at the same time, I think that this was becoming certainly a really important issue in the media and elsewhere. There was a small group of students on campus and I think 2006 that felt like this position and Patrick Archie, he was mentioned earlier, he's in the back of the room there, our farm educator. These students felt like these two positions were critical enough that they put together a proposal, went to the provost, asked him for funding, they went to Stanford Dining, asked if they would sort of house this position for a certain period of time. There was an agreement made where the provost would fund it for two years, we would house it, manage it for two years. And then at the end of the two years, our organization felt like this position was creating enough value for the organization and for the university and was supporting our mission of supporting the academic mission of the university that we ultimately decided to fund the position internally. And so that's been the history and evolution of the work. It started out as largely an undergraduate initiative, Aaron Gaines, who was among the students who initially proposed this position, filled the position for two years after school, is now in law school, is an amazing person. And now I'm sort of taking the mantle of leadership with a little bit of different background and experience. Terrific. So we wanna dive into the first project that we're going to talk about. That project in its full form came out of last year's food summit. Matt and I had done some collaborating before between the food service and my class at the D school. And we were kind of teed up to do that again, but we got Ariana in the loop to do some research from a more traditional academic perspective on the impact that the solutions might have. And you'll hear about that in a minute. So the challenge that we ended up presenting to my students in sustainable abundance, which is a multidisciplinary group of graduate students, was to develop solutions to reduce the consumption of meat among freshmen in the dining halls. And we chose meat because it's a goal for Matt to reduce the consumption of meat in his sustainability metrics. And because it's a controversial hot get people fired up topic. And we targeted freshmen because we felt freshmen were at a particularly pivotal point. They're coming out of their home. They're really shaping new food behaviors. So Michelle is gonna come and talk to us about her team's process and solution as part of this process. I'm gonna stand up because I have to. So what was it like to work on this in a class? It was one of the most exciting parts of my year last year was a really exciting project to be on. And one of the benefits was doing a project like this with the process of the design school, which Deborah mentioned. Get the slides up. Great. So this is a little bit more detail around the process. So we started with the empathy stage, which really meant going into the dining halls and talking and trying to understand our user, which in this case were freshmen students. So understanding what's really important to them, what are their needs, what needs they have from the dining halls that aren't being met. And so we had tons of conversations. But we really wanted to talk to all sorts of users. So that includes people that are huge fans of the dining halls, people that aren't such huge fans, and people that have special eating needs, allergies, they're vegan, and then people who just need to eat a lot of food. So like athletes. And then we kind of came together as a team of four students to synthesize some of the themes that we had heard. So something that kind of kept coming up repeatedly was students felt that although the food was great, sometimes it seemed really mass produced and could be impersonal. And a lot of times what they see in the big containers, the big vats of food, look less appetizing than what it was in reality. So we kind of wanted to push that, kept talking to students and we came to the second part of this process, which is define. And what define really means is come to your design point of view. So the point of view is a statement that is really specific and kind of articulates the challenge that you, your team as designers is trying to solve. So it should be generative, it should inspire your team to have lots of ideas, it should be specific and paint a clear picture of the user and somewhat provocative. So the point of view we came to from all these conversations was that students who feel like no one gives about their food need to believe that care and personal attention has gone into their dining experience because love is missing from the freshman year and love inspires good choices, specifically around eating. So moving from the define from the point of view we went into the next stage, which is ideation. So that was a lot of brainstorming. And for this it was really great to have such a multidisciplinary team. So I'm a MBA student, we also had a mechanical engineer, a chemical engineer and a Sloan fellow, which is a master's program at the business school for experience executives. And so we just did tons of brainstorming about how can we infuse this feeling of love and personal attention into the dining hall. And then you get all those ideas and then just did kind of rapid and iterative prototyping. So we spent a lot of nights in the dining halls trying out a ton of different solutions to make students feel the love. So I'll show you some of our prototypes, some of our favorite ones. This was kind of trying to pre plate meals that students would see when they entered the dining halls and it kind of did a few things. One it anchored the students on what a balanced meal might look like before they go in. So just kind of seeing the colors on the plate, seeing the variety, seeing the vegetables set something in their mind before going in of like, oh, that's what it looks like to eat a balanced meal instead of just a ton of french fries on a plate, which we saw a lot. And what it also did was kind of make the food look a little different than it does look when you're in the dining hall. So it looked fancy and a little bit special and we got some really good feedback on that. Another thing we tried was kind of to get away from the impersonal mass produced feeling of food in large servings, tried putting some of the non meat items into little bowls and trying to see if that changed how the students felt about eating the vegetables. And finally we thought about how can we make the students connect to the people that are preparing their foods? So by calling attention to some of the dining hall staff members and highlighting a little bit about them and the food items that were their favorite and kind of specifically doing that for non meat items. So communicating the love and the care that went into the preparation of the food in the non meat items. And the whole time of this process we're working hand in hand with the dining hall staff which was really fun, getting them involved in the execution and some of the ideas and it made it a lot easier and it was really a fun experience. So finally we kind of at the end of the quarter put some of the solutions that worked well together into a package that we called Meals Made With Care. The idea is that build this bridge between the people that are preparing the food and the attention that's going into it into the student perception and build that bridge specifically around the non meat items. So we can meet this unmet need that the students are feeling for care and personal attention and do that specifically with non meat and by doing that kind of change the balance of what they're consuming. Terrific. Thank you Michelle. So we had several teams and we always come up with solutions in the class. Nitsan Weisberg co-teaches this class with me, she's sitting in the room today and we were delighted that in this class because we had Ariana involved and Matt was very excited about this we decided at the beginning that we would choose the best solutions and actually implement them for a period of time in the dining hall and research what the impact was. So this was one of the best solutions. There was one other solution we ended up incorporating too and I'm gonna give you a quick overview of that all of those students actually have graduated. Their point of view as Michelle talked about was that night owls struggle to balance their new found college freedom with the need to achieve and the current dining experience comes up short in helping them make this trade off. There aren't a lot of good late night eating options the ones that there are on campus are mostly junk food. So this was an issue. They adopted an approach of helping night owls feel and be accomplished by providing energy sustaining foods and telling people what food can do for them not what it contains. So again, as Michelle described in spending lots of time in the dining hall engaging with the freshmen they found that a lot of people really wanted to eat good food but they were pretty burnout on studying and they did not wanna have to study to figure out what they should eat. So they didn't wanna know this has so much fat and so much protein and so much whatever they wanted something that was more meaningful and spoke to them. So they came up with a labeling system that was more behavioral. They identified food as energy food which helps you stay awake, mood food which helps make you happy or brain food which helps you think. And this was not like random stuff they made up they worked with a dietitian and because their challenge was reducing the consumption of meat they were biased toward fruits and vegetables not toward meat products. And then Matt and his team with Ariana heavily involved took all of this, combined the two projects and rolled them out and so this is some of the material that came from the actual implementation in the dining halls which happened in the spring quarter. They called it food for the home stretch positioned it as helping people get through finals through that difficult part of the end of the quarter. They added a category home foods bringing in the point of view of Michelle's team to energy food brain food and mood food and had the staff pick of the day and would feature a chef with an image personalizing it and adding the, here's the plate here's what this chef recommends and here's why. So we ran that experiment through the end of the quarter and Ariana had teed up research at the beginning and now Ariana's gonna come and talk to us about what we learned. Hi. Well, you're not coming you're gonna sit. Am I sitting? You're on. No, you're gonna sit. So while they were busy prototyping I started doing baseline data collection before they really started prototyping. So to kind of get a feel for what the students were eating I did a food frequency questionnaire in four dining halls. There was two intervention dining halls and two control dining halls match for size. And we literally flipped a coin, Matt and I and deciding what was gonna be the intervention dining hall and what was gonna be the control dining hall. And I would say that the intervention was effective. We implemented the intervention during finals a time associated with high stress and research has shown that stress is associated with unhealthy eating behaviors. And to some extent I think we expected the students to eat unhealthy during finals and the control group, as you can see, they did eat unhealthy. They increased their junk food consumption. They increased their high fat meat consumption and their value for eating a healthful diet actually decreased. Conversely the intervention group, their junk food consumption remained relatively steady and somewhat decreased. Their high fat meat consumption decreased and their value for eating a healthful diet actually increased. And this was during finals. And it really is difficult to change eating behavior. And I think that to some extent this intervention was able to combat the effect of stress in only four weeks. So Arianna, you've looked at a lot of different eating interventions over your career and I'm wondering if there were things that stood out for you about the approach or the intervention that you think may have helped contribute to the fact that it really did help change eating behaviors. I believe that what stood out the most to me was that this intervention was designed to fit these students' needs. And the whole prototyping approach was very tailored to Stanford students. And prototyping is to somewhat invaluable because we were able to not only see how the students would react but how the staff would react to the intervention before it was ever implemented. Also what stood out to me was that this prototyping approach was cheap, fast and quick. And it could be really helpful in not wasting time in developing interventions in the future during like a piloting phase. Terrific, thank you. And so we're really excited about this project for a couple reasons. I think it really shows how we're leveraging the assets that I talked about very effectively, the collaboration across the campus, the creativity, the resources in the dining service. We felt really good about that. We're happy about the results. We're also very excited that the dining service has actually adopted the prototype and they're rolling it out on a larger scale now in the new Ariyaga family dining commons that's just opening up. So that's very exciting to contribute to something that continue to grow and evolve. So now we're going to switch to the second project which is the project focused on the supply chain. And, Jenny, can you tell us a little bit about this initiative? What impacts are you hoping it will have? How are you tackling it? Sure, first I'll just talk about the sort of multiple hats that I'm wearing that help move this project along. I work for MAT in the Sustainable Foods Program and I also work as a regional organizer for a national nonprofit called Real Food Challenge. And the work of Real Food Challenge is essentially to coalesce and coordinate university activists at campuses across the country who are working to shift their schools food purchasing towards fair, local, organic, and humane sources and what we really call real food. The RFC structure is focused on having folks like me who coordinate student activists in their region. So we have regional organizers on the West Coast, the Mid-Atlantic, the Northeast and so on. And I focus on California, which is a region unto itself. And then we have the grassroots leaders at each of these schools who do the actual on the ground work of shifting their schools food purchasing. Both the regional organizers and these grassroots leaders participate on national level working groups that steer the direction of RFC's future. So we have a working group that actually explicitly deals with metrics and what is the future of RFC's metrics and how we approach this question of real food and really push those boundaries. I think the value to an institution like Stanford of being plugged into RFC is the very fact that we're now part of a network of schools who are trying to do the same thing in different ways. We are a self-operated dining service and only 30% of schools in the United States are self-operated. So that sets us apart from a lot of the schools that I work with, but it does give us some leverage when we're working with food service providers or food distributors to be part of a larger network. I think the value to RFC is also really unique in that what Stanford Dining offers is this possibility of really pushing the boundaries. RFC focuses on campus commitments to sign on to the purchase of 20% real food, which is similar in some sense to campus climate commitments, 20% carbon neutral. We're saying 20% real food by 2020. We're in California, we're a self-operated dining service. We have a sustainable foods program and we have Matt doing all this great work. So we have the chance to push those boundaries to not only sign on to the purchase of real food, but also create transparency and push the envelope beyond that 20% figure to a higher number. So that work is what's going on in the actual national level working groups and is what we look forward to ratifying in a more explicit way at RFC's national convergence which is happening in the winter. What I think is sort of the value for me and for other students of working with RFC is that we are working explicitly with students and with educational institutions. What that means is not only that we have a $15 billion market which is university food service to work with, it's really that we are creating a generation of food activists at these universities. We're engaging them and hopefully in the future they serve as advocates for a peaceful food system in whatever capacity they're working in. And to this issue of using Stanford as a living lab and influencing those 200 million meals, I think it's also influencing the lies of these students and enabling them to be better activists and organizers in the future. So to that end, we're also working on the campus level with each of these schools. Our big initiative coming up for the entire network of real food challenge schools all across the country and also at Stanford is Food Day which is meant to be a time to celebrate and galvanize and educate students about the work that is happening whether it's in the supply chain or related to community food access issues like we heard about from Full Circle Farm and healthy eating interventions and so on. So really to help students realize that no matter what issues they're passionate about it is somehow related to this issue of real food and a real food system. So I want to get a little more clarification on the role that Stanford might play in pushing the work of the real food challenge schools to a higher level. So obviously there are a lot of schools that are already involved and as you point out Stanford is in maybe a different position than a lot of them in terms of having their own food service and being in California and so let's pretend that this is an incredible home run that our ability to sort of pioneer a different level of impact and commitment is as good as it can be. It's off the chart. What are some of the kinds of things that you think might change in terms of the behaviors of other schools or what could you see happening as a result of our pioneering efforts in collaboration with this broader group? So RFC definitely has schools that are at multiple levels and multiple stages in this process of transforming their school's food system. A lot of schools are just getting started and then there's a whole host of schools, not that many, but a couple dozen who are in a position like Stanford to push not only the actual amount that they are purchasing of real food but also demand a greater level of transparency from food service providers and distributors. So I guess what it would look like is a gold standard in some way, a premium standard for what real food is and also a coalition of schools who are actively working to constantly improve and also purchase within that gold standard. Great. So for the three of you who worked on the food behavior project, what was it like to collaborate across this group of organizations on the campus, you know, at the end of this project? What are some of your major reflections on what you liked or what you hated about collaborating in this way? It was for as a researcher who mostly did health behavior research and knows a lot about theory. It was nice to see how other people across campus design projects. And I think that for me, I enjoyed collaborating. I think Matt and I are good friends now and it was interesting to see his perspective and kind of see, and don't quote me on this, but it was, I think that we used a method for this project that a lot of businesses use to get people to consume their products and maybe to some extent, eating healthy is a product that we're trying to sell and we did that in the dining halls. I think I'm an alum of the D school. So I'm biased in the approach that's taken there. But I think, you know, what that process allows for in this case as well is a number of different people from various disciplines with various backgrounds, with various knowledge, with various of their own insights coming together around these really big problems. And I think that to the extent that all of that is true, that the insights that we gained from this were remarkably powerful. You know, I think that the idea that these students weren't experiencing love that we could give that to them or provide that in a meaningful way was really interesting. And I think framing food in the context of a benefit-based approach as opposed to calories and grams of this and grams of that was also a really remarkable insight that came out of this. And I think that that's the result of this interdisciplinary group coming together and really working on these projects. Yeah, I think Matt put it perfectly. I think coming together outside of your school that you're in into a new building with people from all over the campus is just really exciting and generates a lot more creativity. And I still have great friends from Team Love. It's just a great experience. What could be better than Team Love? So I have to give a small commercial for our Sustainable Abundance class, Winter Term, which will again be focused in the general area of food. So it's graduate level class, application class, if you're interested, definitely check out the D-School site or find me, we are looking for great students. So end of commercial. For all of you, based on your experience with the respective projects that you're working on so far, recognizing that you're in different phases, when you think about this living lab construct and you think about the various assets that we have on the campus and you look forward at the possibilities. What excites you? What do you see as the potential that could be tackled if we continue to apply resources, target projects, et cetera? Yeah, I'm happy to jump in. I think these projects have kind of proven the concept that this interdisciplinary, highly collaborative approach to these really big problems works well. I think we've demonstrated that there are resources, not only here on campus, but in the community, to bring the bear on some of these problems. What I'm seeing now, and we've already teed it up, and actually Julie Kennedy mentioned it earlier, is in addition to these two projects that we have going on, I think that we can apply the learning of this and this process to establishing what I'm thinking of as basic food education, which would, and you've heard it, I think a number of times already today, but because I think it's in part really powerful, but it's the idea of combining the basic education of growing food, the basic education of cooking food, layering in basic consumer education from the perspective of a sustainable food system and working with Patrick and others on campus to kind of make that component happen. I think what we can do with that is layer on perhaps a more academically rigorous component or more theoretical framework on top of that with virtually any aspect, any school, any discipline on campus. So we can become the sort of hub of food systems education that reaches out and connects with these different, and various aspects of these big issues that we're dealing with. And so I think the conversation we're having now is how do we move in that direction? And again, we've already initiated that with a number of students and faculty on campus. And I think the result of that is gonna be really powerful and really interesting, so. Anyone else like to add to that? I would like to continue collaborating with other people. I know that I was collaborating with Matt and you on this project. And I think that in my lab, we're currently collaborating with the School of, like with the psychology department. And I think that learning from other people who share the same kind of end goal. So I would enjoy people to eat healthy and the obesity epidemic to kind of be relieved a little bit. And I think that as Matt said, collaborating can only, and looking at it from these different angles can only make our interventions more successful. And I had something else, but I forgot it, so. I guess I would add that food obviously touches everyone. And so there's a huge population on campus. And like Ariana said, these prototypes that we're doing are really quick and you can turn them around really quickly. People are eating three meals a day. And I really love the concept of starting with the user, the user-centered design process. So there's this huge population of people that you can interview and talk to about what they're eating and try things out. So I love that we got to do that. And I think it's great you're doing more. I'm gonna echo a lot of what was said before about the educational aspect of food. I'm really excited not only by the initiative, but by the idea of bringing my peers into the fold and helping other people understand what it is that we're doing. And what that means for their own work and perhaps establishing basic food education, also food systems study more generally. And food advocacy as a real issue on campus and that is impactful and really makes a mark. Terrific. We wanna open it up to the audience and let you ask questions. Did we provoke any questions for any of you? I think Antonella has mics back here. Back in the back corner, Antonella. Hi, my name's John Bailey with Executive Director for Top 10 Produce, which is a small ag tech company. I've heard of the real food challenge, but I would wonder, entrepreneurs and people who are in the ag tech space, what's a place for us to go to reach out to make connections to some of the student energy that is available? So I guess it's a question for me and RFC. So contacting the, if your work is centered on a particular region, contacting regional organizers can be useful. If it's in California, it's me and my mentors who work in California. Contracting our administrative team at the national level, I think they'd be open to figuring out what the possibilities are of working with ag tech companies and other entrepreneurs working in the real food space. And a quick plug for the business school. The number of GSB students that are interested in sustainable food and agriculture is just taking off every year. So employment opportunities or opportunities to work with MBA students and for credit projects during the school year, would be really interested in that. So I think your question also has a broader element that may relate to others in the audience, which is people in the community look at Stanford and say, wow, lots of incredible student energy, lots of great resources, but don't have any idea how they might access that or connect. And Christopher, maybe this is something we can talk about again as we wrap up. We have tried in the food summit program group to be a little bit of a hub to give visibility to organizations in the community who are interested in working with researchers or others at Stanford and pass those things around and see if there's a match. I mean, it is essentially a matchmaking process. And we will continue to do that. So if you have an interest in working with us, Christopher is always a great contact. I'm also happy to channel that into the food group and we'll see if there's a happy combination, just like match.com. Okay, any other questions? Here in the back. Thank you. My name is Kitty Wells and my company is called Spice Farm. I'm focusing on education of food and function. And I think it's great that you labeled foods and started the education around the functionality of brain food, mood food, happy food. How deep did your education go? Did you get down? Did you just call it brain food or did you point out omega threes in the salmon made of brain food? Matt, how detailed did you get? Yeah, so the way of setup is that in the servery, so where the students are deciding what they're gonna eat at that particular moment, we provided these little placards next to the dish, which typically was written on the sneeze guard and the little placard had a corresponding icon as well as whatever it was, whether it was home food or brain food or whatever. What we found in our experience in managing dining halls is that the most captive point or one of the most captive points for students is when they're actually sitting down at the tables. And so we, and we have, they're called table tents. It's basically an eight and a half by 11 piece of plastic in which you put a piece of paper with information. We have these out on every table on every dining hall anyway to broadcast relevant information to the students. So we use those to post more detailed information about those categories of food and why they had the benefits that they did. And I think that that combination of making the connection with the icons as well as that more detailed information provided the education which does influence the eating behavior. So to answer your point, simply yes, there was more information made available as to why those types of foods had the benefits that they do. And one of the things that's really exciting about the Ariya family commons dining facility, which is brand new and loaded with the latest technology is we were a little bit constrained in the dining halls we were originally working on because it'd be great to have a screen on the line that you could feed information to and make it dynamic and change it all the time. And we didn't have that. And they do have that now at Ariya and as they continue to expand this and other programs, I think there is tremendous, really exciting potential to do all kinds of things with deeper education and information. Hi, I'm Allison Caruse, I'm here I'm with the School of Humanities and Sciences here. I really admire the kind of collaboration that's happening here. It seems extremely distinctive. But I was struck by the difference between the user framework in this panel versus the participant terminology that was sort of central to the full circle farm group that spoke earlier. And I'm first curious to hear you reflect on maybe the differences and potential similarities between thinking about the community that you're working with as participants in the food system as opposed to users of the kind of end of that system. And I was also a sort of to play devil's advocate a bit. I'm wondering if any thinking or research or dialogue went on around some unintended consequences these kinds of behavior modifications could have, particularly for students who struggle with eating disorders, negative body image, not eating enough and so forth. So those are kind of my two questions. I'll tackle the latter one about unintended consequences. So they're, and I was surprised to learn this, but there is a large population of students on campus with eating and body disorders. And there's actually a group of various people on campus working on this issue, including our own Elaine McGee, who's our wellness and performance dining nutritionist. So the answer to the question, yeah, we're very aware of it. And we worked with Elaine. She was actually the one that informed the information around the brain food, the mood food, and helped craft that in a way that to minimize or mitigate any unintended consequences. We think we did that to a certain extent by highlighting the benefits of the food rather than the calories or some of these other things that would lead to susceptible students to focus on. So anyway, yeah, we're aware of it. I don't know that we have any data to suggest that we were able to mitigate that, but I think we feel pretty confident based on the collective body of knowledge available that we were able to do so. Does anyone else wanna take a stab at the user versus participant? I'm happy to do that. Yeah, I think you're probably. Yeah, so from my perspective, first of all, we use the term user because our design process is user focused. So when we talk about user in the context of this project, we were focused on the person whose behavior we were trying to influence. They are participants in the food system. So to some extent, I don't see the distinction as particularly significant. Were we to be driving a project at Full Circle Farm, such as the project you heard about earlier, we would view the students who were receiving the education as the users. So I mean, it's sort of disciplined jargon, if you will, but I think we would agree that everyone we were trying to impact is a participant in the food system. Hi, Margie Friedman from San Jose State. I've always looked up to Stanford as a model of healthy food and healthy environment, and I've tried to copy you down the road, but have been unsuccessful, primarily because of the lack of support from the dining services. So one of the questions I'm kind of wondering, do you think that Stanford students or any student for that matter that is going to university these days looks at the food environment as a selling point to choose that university, because I always get kind of the pushback from my dining center, what we're giving students what they want and the latest iteration, which I had to bring to the president and provost's attention was their seriology sign, the science of cereal, whereby they have cereal in the student store that they can add toppings to, including chocolate syrup, which I don't think anyone has ever seen in real life. So, and they say, well, we're giving students what they want. Now, I'm just wondering if Stanford is unique, like attracts a certain type of student, like you see Santa Cruz, it attracts the EcoMind student, but San Jose State was just different. How much can we make this? Because I believe what you're saying is social marketing. It's nothing to do with nutrition. People aren't buying this stuff because of nutrition. USDA might play, I'm sorry, we're so far beyond knowing that that works. What is it, how can we get that student buy-in, is there something unique about Stanford that you've done that I can use to make these changes, or is it just part of the whole culture? I'm not sure if I've asked that question well, but what's the driver, which comes first? That either dining center is attracting the student or the student is pushing you, so that's kind of really my question. Yeah, whoa. Yeah, yeah. So I think what I had said earlier, what really stood out to me in this project was that it was designed to fit these students' needs. And the students said to the people who were designing and iterating and prototyping what they needed. And I think at San Jose State, you need to find what your students need and what your students need may be very well different than what Stanford students need, but this project stood out because it fits Stanford students' needs. But I want to add something to that that I think is really important, which is we do not, using the process we're talking about, we do not determine need by going up to someone and saying what do you need. The view is people are often not very good at being in touch with or articulating their real need. So it takes a deeper process of empathy. So as Michelle said, they uncovered a need for students to feel love in their food. Well, I guarantee you, if we went up to 1,000 freshmen and said what do you need, no one would say that. And so my guess is that at San Jose State when they're saying this is what we're serving the students' needs, they're dealing at a very superficial level. And if they dug deeper, or you dug deeper and really identified what was driving these students and what do they need at a deeper level, it would probably look very different. Yeah, and I might build on that. And I'd be more than happy to meet with you afterward and probably pull in our Executive Director, Eric Montell, into the conversation. But what I can say is that I think the uniqueness of our situation here is that we have a student body that cares about these issues and they've made that known. They want to participate at a real level in what we're actually doing on campus. So I think that that's certainly part of it. I think the other part is that we really do have a corporate culture within residential and dining enterprises that values this. And so I think, without that support, I don't know that we would be as successful in doing what we're doing. So I think a lot of it starts there. And I think, again, it comes back to, with respect to that corporate culture, I think Shirley Everett's done a really great job of this, our mission is to support the academic mission of the university. And so when you're making decisions about what the organization is gonna do in support and what we're gonna fund in all of these things, I think when you come back to that, it's allowed us to be successful in that regard. Now I would say that there is a certain extent, we do, to a certain extent, give students what they want. I mean, they like pizza. They like french fries, they do. But I think, and there's always gonna be some part of that, right? But we can predict what they're gonna want. They're gonna want things with salt, fat and sugar, that's pretty easy. What's more challenging and where we're going is, again, this sort of using education in these framing in a very different way, using user insights to educate and influence these students to think about their food in a little different way. So that's kind of how we're at. That's sort of where we're at here. And again, I'd be happy to talk to you more afterwards. So we have time for one more question because we're gonna end right on time. I think there's one in the back. And there is a microphone coming. Hi, I'm Andrea Bloom and I'm the founder and CEO of ConnectWell. We teach sustainable practices around wellness, which includes eating activity and stress management. So I have a question about the real food challenge because in our eating program, we really focus on a healthy eating pattern which is based on whole foods. And it strikes me that 20% real food, which I translate into whole foods is a very, very low goal. And it's not part of a healthy overall eating pattern. So my question is, what is the percent of whole foods served at the eating commons in Stanford? And what's a stretch goal for a Stanford for serving whole foods for the student population? I'll speak first to that question of 20% being a really low number. So we place the US food system as having about 2% real food. And a lot of the dining systems that I work with, particularly at two year colleges, state schools and so on, have effectively 0% real food right now because they're contracted with food service providers who are in turn plugged into contracts with big food distributors and big food companies like Tyson and Cargill and so on. So part of this is like a very gradual incremental effort but even getting that amount of whole food and then doing, and real food right, and doing education and education around that so that students continue to demand more and more of it is the approach that we take. And at schools that do not have these resources built up yet, it can be a frustrating but rewarding process eventually because we have had sign on from the entire UC system for instance to purchase 25% real food by 2020. A striped school for Sanford is something that we would need to work out and I think it's dependent on what we can negotiate and work on with the other schools in our network who are in a similar position. I agree with you, I would love to advocate for more whole food, especially in California when we have access to all these resources of wonderful local and sustainably produced products. But I think as a national goal, especially considering that we are operating in the Northeast and the South and places where agriculture and organic agriculture does not have as strong of position in that space, that geographic space. 20% is also realistic. So building on that, we, part of my job at this position is to evaluate the sustainability of all of the food that we buy. And you talk about whole foods, Jenny and the real food challenge talk about real foods. I mean, there are a number of definitions around so-called sustainable food but I think a common challenge that we face is that we have a pretty good understanding of how to evaluate the ecological impact of the food that we buy in part because there are third party standards that are used ubiquitously. USDA or organic would be the most probably notable. But the challenge we've run into in evaluating the sustainability of the food that we buy is that there aren't good metrics for understanding the socioeconomic impact of our food purchases. We use proxies like local, like small and independent, again as proxies for quote unquote sustainable food but the reality is that they don't really work that well. There's some fundamental challenges there. So we are working on this fair food project to help solve that problem so that we can really evaluate how sustainable our food is. So that's part of it. But that being said to your question about stretch goals and we do have a process and metrics in place. It spits out a number at the end of the day. It's relative. I wouldn't even wanna quote it because it wouldn't mean anything to you but our goal by 2015 is to double that percentage of so-called sustainable food at least as we're defining it today. And just to create a ballpark, I assume double would be a lot higher than 25%. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Okay, I wanna thank the panel not only for their great involvement in the panel but also for their fabulous work. And I wanna thank you all for your great attention. And now we have another exciting panel on hospital food. The preceding program is copyrighted by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Please visit us at med.stanford.edu.