Professor Wiens is a registered dietitian-nutritionist and teaches nutrition classes at UD. She currently teaches BHAN 130: Sustainability and Food. In this class, students are introduced to the use of local/seasonal food and partner with UD’s farm to enjoy farm-to-table food.

Professor Wiens grew up watching David Suzuki, an environmentalist. She attended UBC and majored in nutrition, which was housed in the health sciences/agriculture department. Subsequently, she was exposed to sustainability when she took agroeconomic classes as an undergrad. Following her time in college, she became a vegetarian and found the closest soap box to talk about topics related to sustainability.

She strongly believes that sustainability is about taking a more holistic approach. While many people think that eating organic is one good way to do so, Professor Wiens stated that “organic” is not a panacea. She mentioned that we can also reduce our eco footprint by: being a locavore more often, choosing organic food wisely, eating more plants, having sympathy for chickens, consuming smaller, wild, local fish, being fair-minded, and creating less waste. She stated that 31-40% of our food is thrown away. That’s more than 20 pounds of food per person every month!

In conclusion, we learned quite a lot about not only sustainability, but also how we as consumers can choose more wisely and help out the environment. Two major keypoints that we took from her talk were that,“sustainability must be livable to be sustainable,” and we must, “strive to be better and not expect perfection.”