From the moment she arrived on campus senior Arielle Carpenter, a Tisch College Citizenship and Public Service (CPS) Scholar, has pursued her passion for nutrition from both in and outside the classroom.“As a CPS Scholar, I have focused all of my projects on nutrition and healthy lifestyles in some respect,” Carpenter explained. “I came to Tufts for its renowned Friedman School of Nutrition, and have been able to focus my double major in psychology and community health around nutrition.”
Having grown up in a health-conscious family, Carpenter remembers being shocked by her friends’ unhealthy eating habits in high school.
“When I went to high school in South Florida, I saw my peers eating their lunches out of high school vending machines -having things like chips and soda everyday- I was appalled,” Carpenter said.
Carpenter then began setting up nutrition awareness tables at her high school and in her community, where she provided students with healthy food samples of healthy food and literature from the Florida Department of Health. She also started giving presentations to local elementary and middle school students about healthy eating and exercise.
At Tufts, Carpenter has continued to educate other students about nutrition and maintaining a healthy lifestyle.
After she saw many of her peers struggle to eat healthy meals during their freshman year, Carpenter formed the campus group FoodTalk with the help of Dining Services nutritionist Julie Lampie. A task force that works in conjunction with Tufts Dining Services, FoodTalk aims to meet the nutritional needs of Tufts students while also teaching students about healthy eating on campus.
“It is important to talk about nutrition and healthy eating on a college campus because some people are just simply unaware of what they eat,” Carpenter explained. “While junk food is cheap, we are trying to show students that it is still relatively easy and affordable to eat healthy on campus.”
In its first two years, FoodTalk (which has since merged with the Tufts Culinary Society) has provided cooking demonstrations, organized presentations by nutritional experts, and brought in food vendors to share samples of new healthy items with students at lunch. In addition, members of FoodTalk have organized interactive demonstrations to help students better understand portion sizes in the dining halls.
“While serving sizes are marked on the nutrition labels in the dining halls, not many people understand what 4 ounces of food may look like,” Carpenter explained. “We are trying to fix this by displaying sample plates for students to actually visualize serving size.”
This year, as part of her CPS Scholar project, Carpenter teamed up with FoodTalk and Dining Services to organize Tufts’ first on-campus Farmers' Market, which was held earlier this month at the Campus Center.
“I really wanted to do a Farmers' Market to create awareness about supporting local agriculture in a way that made it accessible for students and faculty to eat locally,” Carpenter explained. “I understand that people do not always have the time to shop at local farm stands. With the Farmers' Market, we are giving people at Tufts the opportunity to purchase local farm produce because we are bringing it right to them.”The Farmers' Market featured produce from local vendors, including green peppers, cucumbers different kinds of apples, pears, zucchini, summer squash, tomatoes, corn, as well as local apple cider and homemade pumpkin and zucchini breads.
The Farmers' Market featured apple cider and produce from Tufts’ New Entry Sustainable Farming Project, a project of the Agriculture, Food, and Environment (AFE) Program of the Gerald J. and Dorothy R. Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy. Carpenter praised the partnership, saying “We were excited to support a Tufts community program while insuring that 70% of the proceeds of the market would go back to the farmer.”
Additionally, Tufts’ bakers made zucchini and pumpkin bread loaves using local ingredients. “These sold out in the first 20 minutes of the market,” Carpendar said. “The whole thing was very successful. We had a huge turnout and hope to make farmer’s markets a sustainable tradition to continue next year.”
Carpenter said that the Farmers' Market also helped educate Tufts students about important nutritional issues.
“My goal of the Farmers' Market was to educate the Tufts community about buying locally and eating healthy,” she said. “We gave out education materials and sample recipes for how to use all of the different products for a healthy meal.”
In addition to working with Tufts Dining Services through FoodTalk, Carpenter is also interning with Dining Services as part of her Community Health internship. She is in the process of creating a nutrition analysis website that will allow students to receive nutritional information about their meals from the dining hall.
