Eating Green
by Tina Chong, Editor-in-Chief on December 10, 2008 in News
• What an environmentally-friendly food program could look like at HKS
A few months ago, Gopal Kapur, a frequent guest lecturer at HKS, launched a program that combines his desire to live a “greener” life with his passion for food – and it’s one that he thinks Kennedy School students could get behind.
The program, called Family Green Survival, has two key components: Eating Green and Survival Eating. Each program asks participants to modify their diet for one day a month and, as a result, reduce energy use, eat better, and develop awareness.
“Eating Green is a personal practice where that day, you use as little energy as possible,” said Kapur. “That means no cooking. You eat everything raw.”
Survival Eating, on the other hand, does not require drastic modifications to what you eat – it just asks you to eat less of it.
“You pledge to eat as the poor people eat in developing countries,” he said. “If at the end of the day you’re not hungry, you’re eating too much!”
Kapur, who lives in California, is a consultant, author, and guest lecturer at HKS for the executive education program. In his spare time, he cooks and writes food columns for local newspapers, emphasizing the use of local, fresh, in-season foods. He says the inspiration for the program came from an experience in Spain, where someone had crossed out an elevator occupancy sign that said “five” with the words, “or three Americans.”
“That stuck in my mind that we’re known to eat too much,” said Kapur. “Even though I’ve been in the U.S. since 1962, I grew up in India where you don’t waste food. I thought I’d like to do something to help people eat less.”
Kapur and his wife tested both Eating Green and Survival Eating six months before going public with it, first trying the plan themselves and gradually introducing it to their children, their neighbors, and their fellow Rotary Club members. Armed with encouraging reactions, Kapur decided to publish the program online, complete with suggested recipes and online registration to keep track of how many people were participating in the program. Since the launch in early October, 627 people have signed up at familygreensurvival.com as official participants.
While the program has been undertaken mostly by individual families to date, Kapur sees the program expanding to student populations at schools and universities. In early October, Kapur pitched the idea of offering his Family Green Survival as an option in the Forum café to Jayne Raffo, the general manager of Sodexo at HKS.
“HKS has so many international students. I thought the program would be a good fit for the student body,” said Kapur.
Because Sodexo is sub-contracted by the Kennedy School, the program would have to receive approval from the school, Sodexo, and the members of the HKS community in order to be instituted as an option.
“Since we have a very small café, we are limited in our daily menu selections – if this option were to be one of them, we would need support from the community,” said Raffo. “If enough interest was generated from faculty, students, and staff, we would be willing to consider the program at HKS.”
So, what would this program look like for students?
Those who choose to participate in Family Green Survival would have an option in the Forum café once a month: for Eating Green, a meal consisting of raw green vegetables, fruit, and nuts; for Survival Eating, small portions of cheap foods that could be found on the plates of the working poor in places like India and China.
Kapur recognizes that the Green Eating program – even at just one day a month – may not come easily to most American students, with its limits on coffee, processed foods, and even using the computer.
“The first two times [my wife and I tried the program], it was not successful. But we tried again.” he said. “I tell people, go out and walk in the backyard. Discover things. Go walk around the neighborhood, talk to people, bother them. Frolic. Sing. Dance. Do something creative.”
Kapur does not have data yet on how much energy would be conserved by adopting his program. While he is in the process of gathering the numbers, he says that changing one’s eating habits for two days a month “is a start.”
And what about cost?
“I’m guessing that a family of four would save about $150-200 a year,” he said. But if it were adopted at HKS, he says the program probably wouldn’t save the school much money - and it may actually result in higher costs for the university.
“But it’s the leadership of it that matters,” he said. “Some things that Harvard is doing for alternative energy will be more costly in the short term. But we have to do our part in the world.”
For more information, visit Family Green Survival at familygreensurvival.com.
Written by Tina Chong, Editor-in-Chief · Filed Under News
Tina Chong is a second-year master in public policy student at the Kennedy School. After receiving her undergraduate degree from Yale, she worked in both the private and non-profit sectors and helped to start up City Year, an AmeriCorps program, in her hometown of Los Angeles. Tina currently serves as the editor-in-chief of the Citizen.
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