The goal of this application is to link Sciences Po students who know how to cook and who like to cook with Sciences Po students who are fed up with eating fast food and who would like to eat a healthy meal at low cost.
“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
More than a hundred and twenty years after her death, Virginia Woolf’s quote points to an issue that remains to be addressed. Concerns over the quality of food and nutrition hit all parts of the French population, but students are particularly vulnerable.
Budgeting life expenses has always been a student challenge. The most important expenditure items in a student’s budget are housing, food and transportation. Studies show that housing represents one fifth (22 to 23%) of the total consumption of students, whose annual spending reach an average of 15 050€ per year. Another fifth is dedicated to food, which includes food and alcohol purchases for the home and spending for food services and cafeterias. Transportation reaches an average of 13% of the total budget. The significant of student’s food budget is notably due to their timetables: half of the food spending of student originates from meals taken outside of the home1. Students consider the offer of university restaurants to be balanced and nutritious, and the regular use of these cafeterias is linked to a realization of the importance of food in health. However, outside of university restaurants, students consider some healthy foods to be too expensive and tend to substitute them with less healthy options2. As a result, students, while privileging healthy foods when possible, might have to arbitrate between relatively expensively priced healthy foods and cheaper unhealthy foods. Moreover, food is a marker for poverty and excavates invisible social inequalities, so students might choose cheaper and less nutritious and balanced food as a function of “equal treatment”3.
The rise of student-led movements and initiatives around the world, such as Friday for Future and SciencesPo’s CAFéS, indicate that students have become well aware of the impact of human consumption on the environment, and food habits make no exception. Livestock represents 14.5 percent of all anthropogenic GHG emissions, with cattle responsible for 65 percent of the livestock sector’s emissions. Feed production and processing of livestock represents 45 percent of emissions4. On the other hand, minimally processed plant source food has the lowest environmental impact: for instance, it requires, ceteris paribus, four times less water than red meat5. SciencesPo’s CAFéS vegan and organic offer translates this awareness.