UNM held a food initiative on Monday to benefit local farmers and call for volunteers to help a good cause.
Daniel Maldonado, marketing director for UNM Food, said the event, called the “Local Food Initiative,” was held from four to six on Monday afternoon in La Posada Plaza. UNM collaborated with La Montanita’s Co-op and Bueno Foods to provide donations to Roadrunner Food Bank
Maldonado said he and his associates asked for volunteers from UNM faculty, students and staff, “anyone who wants to help” package the local food to be donated, he said.
“We want to give this idea of locals feeding locals, and for a few reasons we thought this would really be a win-win for everyone,” he said.
The donations consisted of beans and rice, Maldonado said, while for the volunteers, La Montanita and Bueno Food donated all the ingredients necessary for green chile cheeseburgers, cooked on-site and served hot to anyone who participated.
Brenda Salazar, a freshman economics and international studies major, volunteered at the event and said he felt like he benefited from taking part.
“It just seemed like it would be a fun opportunity, and you get community service for it,” Salazar said. "It’s better than sitting in my room watching Netflix."
Maldonado booked a band, Merican Slang, for the event to provide music for those volunteering their time to the cause, and in order to “have a really fun evening helping other people.”
“It was just kind of a, you know, ‘how can we give back?’ and ‘how can we really support our local community?’ whether that would be growers, campus community or city-wide community,” Maldonado said.
Bueno Food and La Montanita were on site, with the latter handing out information on the initiative to passers-by, in order to “really highlight how these local businesses utilize our local farmers, how one hand kind of feeds the other,” he said.
J.R. Riegel, volunteer program coordinator for La Montanita, said that the organization, which donates to Roadrunner regularly, donated all of the beans and rice being packaged by volunteers to benefit Roadrunner Food Bank.
“A lot of Albuquerque natives are into the local food movements and supporting local farmers, but I think it hasn’t picked up with the student crowd as much. So I’m really happy to be here and, you know, spread the word about local food, local producers, organics, all that stuff,” Riegel said. “I think it’s really important for us to be here, because the Co-op is something different. It’s a cooperative: it’s community-owned by the farmers that grow the food and by the families that eat the food.”
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Christopher Scrivano, executive culinary director for UNM Food, said the idea for the event came to him at the beginning of the semester, an idea that later evolved into the goal of packing a thousand portions of beans and rice, all grown by local farmers and donated by La Montanita.
The green chiles for the burgers were roasted fresh on site and donated by Bueno Foods, he said. Both Bueno and La Montanita products are used widely throughout campus.
When he arrived this semester, Scrivano said he began talks with the University about partnering with the goal of using more local products on campus, and hoped the event would boost that purpose as well as help those in need.
“There’s a really strong sense of community in this state,” Scrivano said. “I thought this would be a really cool event to support the local farmers, support the local vendors as well as support the local community.”
Both Scrivano and Maldonado said they were grateful to the UNM community for coming out to volunteer, and hope to do more events in the future.
Matthew Reisen is a senior reporter for the Daily Lobo. He can be reached at news@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @DailyLobo.
