Local Food for Eckerd Students

 Local Food for Eckerd Students - Jake Caldwell.                    

- May 12, 2022


Localfood.Eckerd is an instagram account I created in order to promote local, sustainable sources of food around St. Pete and the Tampa Bay Area for Eckerd students. I wanted to do this for my project because I have taken many courses here at Eckerd focusing on food sustainability and movements. Supporting local food businesses over other grocery stores nearby like Publix or Walmart, can have not only tremendous impacts for the environment, but also for the local community, allowing Eckerd students to feel more in touch to the area where they live.

My goal for this project was to promote the benefits of choosing to eat local food specifically to Eckerd students. With the creation of the Eckerd community farm this year, I figured it would be a great time to spread awareness on this topic while also promoting the Eckerd farm. I wanted to both educate Eckerd students on the environmental benefits of local food and also be able to relate it to Eckerd through the farm. Because of this, I chose to create an instagram for this project as it would allow me to create multiple posts for different topics, and because instagram is one of the main social media platforms for college students and would have the ability to reach the most amount of people.

To start this instagram, I wanted to post a couple introduction-type media, in order to ease the idea into students' minds. Therefore, my first 2 posts included information about the choices students can make in regards with food, and the positive impacts of these choices.
   


After posting about education, I wanted to have several posts offering off-campus locations to get sustainably sourced food by local people. To do this, I found several different restaurants that use sustainable, seasonally local ingredients served on their menu. Along with this, I did some research and found different markets in the St. Pete area near Eckerd, where students can buy from the farmers themselves.


To have this all circle around to back on campus, I worked with the Eckerd Community Farm community to learn about their harvests throughout the year. During this time, I found out that the farm had harvested 412 pounds of produce, which was given over to cafe bon-appetite which would be used for food in the main cafeteria. This is not promoted in the cafeteria, so I found it essential and exciting to share this with the students. In addition, in order to gain more coverage and attention, I asked the farm social media coordinator, Professor Himmelfarb, to share my post covering what the farm is doing involving local, sustainable food. He was kind enough to do this, and it brought a lot more attention from Eckerd students to my instagram account.



For this project, my main audience was Eckerd students, of course. Therefore, the strategies I aimed for throughout my posts was based from Stoknes, which was "making it simple to choose right". Throughout my posts, I made sure to keep a positive, stress free dialect so students would get the feeling that these are simple easy changes one can make. This also relates to Stoknes' idea of framing your message through actionable steps. I did this through listing nearby markets that can easily substitute for grocery stores, and local restaurants that students can try the next time they go to dinner. In addition, I also made sure to tailor my message to an Eckerd audience. This strategy is from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, where they describe the "Six America's" and understanding who your audience is. Considering the majority of Eckerd students are environmentally conscious, I made sure to communicate in a hopeful, positive language that would inspire them, and offer new activities that would excite them.

My goals for this project was to reach 25 followers and get 10 likes on each post. My follower count ended up with a total of 35, which exceeded my goal by 10, which I was proud of. However, only one of my points reached over 10, which received a total of 17 likes. My other pictures averaged around 7 likes, which was disappointing. One thing that proved to be difficult during this project was that instagram is a difficult platform to get attention on. While the college age group is most active on there, it is difficult to get any love when your account is about small scale awareness. This required me to spend extra time spreading the word in person about my account, in order for more people to see it. However, with some shares from other people, it can be a great tool to spread a positive message exponentially.


Stoknes, P. E. (2015). What we think about when we try not to think about global warming: Toward a new psychology of climate action. Chelsea Green Publishing. 

Instagram page: https://www.instagram.com/localfood.eckerd/













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