OH MY SQUASH! Kate Beaton (left) and Marni Kaldjian (right) display community-grown veggies at the first-ever UWEC Centennial Campus Market earlier this month.

More and more, the taste buds of the Valley are getting acclimated to locally-sourced food. Valley farmers bring their harvest to Phoenix Park in Eau Claire three days a week, there are weekly markets at Eau Claire’s Festival Foods as well as in Menomonie and Chippewa Falls, and people can’t get enough of them.

“Seeing that Eau Claire has this vibrant community and there are opportunities for activism right here, I think that’s really important. It makes it easy for students to say, ‘I’m gonna stay here and help this community. This is a place worth putting energy into.’ We can still push that farther.” – Marni Kaldjian, organizer of the UWEC Centennial Campus Market

But on the UW-Eau Claire campus, it’s kind of a different story. Students – especially first- or second-year ones – naturally tend to attach themselves to the safety and familiarity of their campus surroundings, and sometimes rarely venture away from the cafeteria, which gets its food from Sodexo.

It can be a pretty big leap for some students to make the trek across town to one of the Phoenix Park markets, so Marni Kaldjian and the Progressive Students and Alumni campus organization are bringing the market to them, right in the shadow of the brand new Centennial Hall on lower campus.

“I love farmers markets. I love local food,” Kaldjian said. “I got on board pretty quickly.”

The UWEC Centennial Campus Market gets all its veggies and produce from the Forest Street Community Garden near downtown Eau Claire – all picked by students the night before – and will hold the market on Thursdays from 7am to noon through Oct. 15.

Kaldjian said the university tried a similar market a few years ago with a couple of vendors posting up in front of Zorn Arena, but due to a number of different factors, it eventually died out.

The Centennial Market, on the other hand, is currently in the midst of its first season of existence, bringing along vendors such as Tangled Up in Hue and Water Street Deli. It’s somewhat of a trial run, and Kaldjian said the PSA specifically put in effort to keep the campus market running year after year and to keep it from losing steam.

“This time, we want to make it more longform and sustainable, just because it doesn’t look good for something like that – a market on campus – to just die out,” she said. “Especially now, when it’s probably the most important time for students to learn about this stuff.”

More than just veggies, the market hopes to bridge that ever-looming divide between university students and the greater Eau Claire community – one of the PSA’s steadfast goals.

By bringing local produce sourced from the community garden right to their doorstep, Kaldjian hopes students take away more than just fresh onions.
“It’s healthy for your body, and it’s healthy for a local economy. You work beside people. You see the faces of the people that produce your food,” she said. “Seeing that Eau Claire has this vibrant community and there are opportunities for activism right here, I think that’s really important. It makes it easy for students to say, ‘I’m gonna stay here and help this community. This is a place worth putting energy into.’ We can still push that farther.”

The Centennial Market is every Thursday from 7am to noon until Oct. 15. For more info, find and follow “UWEC Centennial Campus Market” on Facebook.