100 mile meal feed hungry students on Marshall’s campus

Marshall University’s Student Association of Nutrition and Dietetics and the MU Sustainability Department organized the 100 Mile Meal event in Towers Market Place Oct. 17. 100 Mile Meal is an effort to improve the dining hall experience and promote healthy eating on campus.

This event was started by the Office of Dietetics and aims to provide food sourced from within 100 miles of Marshall’s campus. This was the fifth year 100 Mile Meal has taken place, and Valarie Randolph, president of the MUSAND and McKenzi Morgan, public relations chair MUSAND, helped to bring the event to life with food service director Cheryl King.

“It brings our community together,” Morgan said. “Any type of event like this tends to do that.”

The Office of Dietetics and Sodexo employees offered dishes such as tossed salad, fried green tomatoes, string beans, cheese ravioli and glazed ham as part of the menu.

“It’s very important to the dining program that we showcase the locality of the food as often as possible,” Ryan Zipperian, unit marketing specialist at Sodexo, said. “This event is very popular with the students for that reason.”

Some of the produce used included apples from Orr farms in Martinsburg, West Virginia, potatoes from Mrs. Dennis Farms in Wauseon, Ohio, radishes from Paradise Farms in Dunbar, West Virginia, and tomatoes and cucumbers from Sprouting Farms in Greenbrier County, West Virginia.

The employees in Towers Market Place, who work to provide students with quality service daily, set up the buffet and presentation for the event.

“I enjoy seeing the happiness on the kid’s faces and seeing that they enjoy the food,” Rosemary Jones, Sodexo supervisor, said. “I love doing the setup because I know when they see me out here doing it, they smile because they know they’re going to get something special.”

Although the event took place in an on-campus dining hall and residents of the dorms participated, it is not exclusive to Marshall students who live on campus. Anyone can eat in Towers Marketplace. While all students can have access to a meal plan whether they live on or off campus, anyone in the community can pay to eat at the dining hall.

“Local products should not be exclusively for people in the dining halls.” Zipperian said. “I would like to see more staff from Marshall participate, the cleaning crew, faculty, professors, secretary. Everyone on campus has a location where they can eat good food.”

Olayinka Bamiro can be reached at [email protected].