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PRESS RELEASE
For Immediate Release
Contact: Crista Martin
June 2, 2003
Phone: 617-496-6705
Harvard University Dining Services and Mollie Katzen
Begin Partnership
CAMBRIDGE Education at Harvard University has never been restricted to classrooms, libraries and study sessions, so it only follows that this fall, Harvard University Dining Services (HUDS), in partnership with renowned author, chef and artist Mollie Katzen, will launch a comprehensive Food Literacy Initiative. Aimed at heightening student understanding and awareness about food from its source to how it is prepared to how it fuels one¹s body to the psychological impact of our dining experience HUDS will launch the Food Literacy Initiative.
HUDS Residential Dining program has long considered itself part of the educational experience at Harvard, and plays an integral role in drawing communities together. With this new program, HUDS will venture further into a more holistic approach to one¹s dining choices.
Katzen, best-known as the pioneering author/illustrator of the classic Moosewood Cookbook and The Enchanted Broccoli Forest, is widely credited with moving healthful cooking from the fringes of American society squarely onto mainstream dinner tables. A charter member of both the prestigious Harvard School of Public Health Nutrition Roundtable and the Natural Health Hall of Fame and named by Health Magazine as one of ³Five Women Who Changed the Way We Eat² Katzen has been increasingly focusing her work on issues of healthy, delicious eating for vegetarians and meat-eaters alike, inspiring us to look at food from many different angles the psychological and cultural as well as the practical and aesthetic.
³We are so thrilled to be working with Mollie,² says HUDS Executive Director Ted Mayer. ³She is an energetic, enthusiastic cooking maven who recognizes what we who have the pleasure of working so closely with students have known for a long time dining has to be fun. But simultaneously, we have to make educated decisions about what we eat. And we need to bring that information literally to the table for our students. The eating habits they learn now will shape the rest of their lives.²
In partnership, HUDS and Katzen want to teach undergraduates to dine with pleasure, confidence, awareness, and wisdom. Says Katzen, ³Food is full of contradictions for many people. I want to help people to cut themselves some slack, to allow themselves some generosity, while still eating well. Most people associate a healthy diet with restrictions. I want to help people rediscover our great capacity for loving genuine, good food that not only tastes great, but also increases our well-being and vitality.²
Katzen, who defines her culinary perspective as a ³garden and orchard-based way of eating,² will also be working with HUDS on training the staff and recipe development, especially around meatless menu options.
³My food philosophy encourages people to find a balance around food,² Katzen says, ³including the aesthetic and psychological factors.²
³I am extraordinarily proud of our program,² says Mayer. ³And our work with Mollie will help us advance to the next level of excellence, in both taste and service.²
Harvard University Dining Services operates 13 residential dining halls, 10 campus restaurants, a kosher kitchen, a campus debit card program, and complete catering services. The country¹s oldest collegiate foodservice operation, HUDS serves approximately 5 million meals a year and ranks third among self-operated collegiate foodservice departments in the nation in annual revenues.
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