Once a week during the semester, students line up in the hallways of Funkhouser anxiously awaiting lunch, which is cooked by fellow students as part of the Farm-to-Fork program.

“Farm-to-Fork is a grant-funded meal program that provides not only free locally sourced lunches using recovered foods and produce, but also education and a sense of community to any UK students,” said Kendra Oo, a UK graduate student studying nutrition and food systems in UK’s College of Agriculture, Food and Environment. “To offer a multidimensional, interdisciplinary approach to college food insecurity, Farm-to-Fork integrates social, sustainable, local and educational elements through healthy lunchtime meals served to approximately 100 students weekly.”

Every Wednesday between 11 a.m.-1 p.m., students are welcomed to eat in Room 207 of the Funkhouser Building. The first day of Farm-to-Fork for the 2019 spring semester is Wednesday, Jan. 23, and lunch will be held every Wednesday until the week leading up to finals week, with the exception of Spring Break.

This effort is led by UK’s Campus Kitchen. The goal is to bring awareness to issues surrounding hunger, albeit in a different way. The focus of the kitchen is on helping people on and off campus in the greater Lexington community while also trying to keep food from going to waste. 

We recently had a chat with Kendra Oo, RDN, one of the founding members of Campus Kitchen, about the Farm-to-Fork program.

For the entire interview and accompanying video, click here.