Food Day Dinners
What’s great about this simple event is that it’s so adaptable. There can be one dinner or many that make up a larger event. A dinner can be small or large:
- Just you and those in your household
- Friends and neighbors sharing a meal in a home
- A neighborhood meal at a community center or park
- PTAs can organize an event at school and invite parents, students, and administrators
- Workplaces can bring together staff and decision makers responsible for workplace food choices (vending machines, cafeterias) for a Food Day lunch
- A large-scale version of this event is an official dinner at city/town hall with dozens to hundreds of simultaneous dinners (or block parties). If your mayor has signed a Food Day proclamation, ask if he or she will ring the dinner bell at a prescribed hour to kick off the night.
At your dinner event, a local foods meal can be complemented by:
- Choosing one or more of the Food Day objectives as the dinner theme. (Participants can visit FoodDay.org to learn about the issue and then join a discussion about how it relates to your local community.)
- Making your own conversation cards that serve as placeholders.
- Using the gathering to consider what the group can do to make a change in the food system.
- Taking a concrete action and signing a petition or writing a letter to producers, elected officials, or retailers.
Other Event Ideas to Celebrate Food Day:
- Organize an official dinner with leaders and activists at city hall with hundreds of simultaneous house/block parties
- Hold debates, workshops or conferences at a school, college or commercial center
- Screen films such as Supersize Me or Pig Business followed by a guided discussion
- Have a ‘junk food exchange’: give away good food in exchange for junk at subway stops, in parks, or in front of schools
- Organize cooking or gardening classes
- Expand (or introduce new) farmers markets
- Invite farmers to talk with restaurateurs and patrons
- Share a delicious, local, health meal with family and friends
- Arrange walking or cycling tours of sustainable farms
- Hold a harvest celebration – or incorporate Food Day into your community’s existing event
- Have a photo or artistic exhibition on food deserts or CAFOs, and invite the press, schools, and community leaders
- Food and taste education a la Slow Food International
- Bring congregation members together on World Food Day (October16) and focus on food and justice through the following week until national Food Day on October 24
- Organize a rally in a park with your mayor
- Incorporate Food Day message into an existing event
Long Term Food Day Activities
These kinds of events can be launched on Food Day to continue the message year round:
- Collect family recipes and self-publish a cookbook
- Improve school, hospital and college food
- Educate kids about food with the Food Day lesson plan
- Launch a campaign on your state’s food policy
- Request calorie labeling in school cafeterias and get rid of soda machines
- Promote food education, including cooking and gardening, in schools
- Plan a community garden and use free urban spaces to grow foods
- Join Meatless Monday or Fast-Food-Free Friday or other pledges
Events In a Box
Need ready-made ideas? We’ve got some for you:
Junk Food Hall of Shame
Build a Junk Food Hall of Shame for display in the lobby of a school, health department, or community center. Show what foods are made of and how those things hurt our health: show the sugar content of 2 liters of soda pop; show the relative amounts of sugar, flour, food additives in Fruit Loops; show the fat and protein content of a hot dog; show what’s lost when whole wheatflour is refined; etc.
Chef and Producer Dinners
Want to promote local food systems and direct sale? Hold a dinner that brings together consumers, chefs and producers. The producers can present their products, while the chefs talk about how to best use them in the kitchen. All the production chain comes up together on stage.
- Select chefs or restaurants that use local products; it’s easiest to hold the event at arestaurant. Ask them to choose 2-3 producers.
- Contact producers and ask them to be guest speakers during one event.
- Ask the chef to build the menu around the products showcased that night.
- Divide the evening into two parts, the first one will be an exhibition and sale of fruits,bread, etc. and then have producers talk about their products during the meal.
- Meet the producer to know what product they will sell and what they want to discuss.
- The chef will come out and explain how he or she uses the product in the kitchen.
- You can even negotiate a deal and sell dinner tickets.
Food Day Debates
It can be exciting to organize a series of debates on controversial food issues between well-known politicians, scientists, government officials, consumer representatives, and industry spokespeople. Some members of the national Food Day Advisory Board may be interested in participating in these debates.
- Find a sponsor (such as a media outlet, college, church, synagogue, or even a supermarket)
- Reserve an appropriate space (plan space around the number of expected attendees not the other way around)
- Get local TV and/or radio stations to broadcast the debates
- Give the media background information on the issues and debaters
- Publicize via email, listservs, fliers, Facebook, local organizations, etc.