Anne Gilliland (COL ’16), Tori Goodell (COL ’16) and Elise Widerlite (COL ’15) have brought Spoon University, an online food publication, to Georgetown.
Most college students love food. But with small dorm room kitchens, repetitive choices at O’Donovan Hall and the expensive prices of Georgetown restaurants, food around campus can sometimes lose its luster. Anne Gilliland (COL ’16) and Tori Goodell (COL ’16), founders of the Georgetown chapter of Spoon University, intend to make sure that doesn’t happen.
Spoon University is an online food publication created by college students, for college students and dedicated to, as it proclaims in its mission statement, making food more than just sustenance. The website was started by two sophomores at Northwestern in 2012 and has grown to include a network of over 600 writers at 35 colleges. Goodell found out about the website from her best friend at Northwestern and mentioned it to Gilliland, who thought the idea sounded perfect.
“We are both English majors and food lovers,” Gilliland said. “The website allows us to combine our two passions.”
Together they worked to bring Spoon University to Georgetown, and although the site is just a few weeks old, it is rapidly gaining momentum. It already has a staff of 40 people and almost 500 followers on its Facebook page.
Elise Widerlite (COL ’15), the club’s photo and video editor and a staff writer for The Hoya, is not surprised that the site has gained popularity so quickly.
“There was a big need for what we were bringing to campus. I know a ton of studentson campus are big food lovers, but there has been no way to express that. We want to give back by telling students how to be creative, both in Leo’s and in their dorm room,” Widerlite said.
“Many students come to college having been served by their parents their whole lives. They don’t know many health tips or tricks or how to cook for themselves. That’s how we want to be a help to students,” Goodell said.
The Georgetown site has several different sections: kitchen 101, food for thought (which contains articles about health and food news), recipes, on-campus happenings, one pot meal, restaurant reviews and late-night food. The founders have also made sure that the website is catered to Georgetown specifically.
“We have to cater to Georgetown. Our website is different from other colleges. For example, Dartmouth won’t have as many articles about order-in and places to eat off campus,” Goodell said.
Goodell’s goal is to make Spoon the “trusted food resource” at Georgetown. Widerlite sees the site becoming such a big presence on campus that it becomes mentioned at prospective student events like GAAP weekend. She envisions a time when a prospective family will ask a tour guide for a lunch recommendation and instead of just turning to the Tombs, the guide would encourage the family to look at the Spoon University page.
“Maybe it could even entice students,” Widerlite said. “They could see what a great food culture Georgetown is surrounded by. We want it to be the website that you check when you are between paragraphs writing a paper at the library,” she said.
However, Spoon University Georgetown is not simply about the food. Widerlite explains that Spoon can become a social force as well,
“I never knew these two girls before. Our staff has all met because of Spoon. I hope that after reading our site, people will actually get up and act. Maybe they will ask someone in the dorm to make a recipe with them or all come together for a dinner. It’s a really special thing when people come together because of food,” she said.
Spoon is also throwing a major launch party to gain recognition for the club as well as to bring people together. The party will happen in mid-April, and they hope it will be something similar to the Spoon launch at Washington University in St. Louis, where there were dozens of food vendors and hundreds of people.
Still, the founding of the site at Georgetown has been far from easy. One of the hardest tasks was differentiating the site from other publications on campus to try to get SAC funding.
“It was really frustrating to try to get SAC recognition,” Goodell said. However, Gilliland thinks the struggle was for the better.
“The process forced us to figure out what we wanted to be. It took a lot of brainstorming, but it forced us to be creative,” she said. Now they feel on much better footing to sort out the formal structure of the club and to determine the administrative details of running it.
All three girls hope that Spoon University Georgetown gives a voice to the campus’ foodies. Widerlite hopes that working for the publication allows people who love to write the chance to break away from always writing in an academic context.
“Spoon give students who are stifled academically a platform for their creative skills,” she said. Goodell believes that the creativity of the website is what makes it unique. “Spoon is a website for college students. We don’t review expensive places and our recipes include ingredients students will actually buy,” she said. They hope the next time students need a study break and want to find out how to recreate their favorite Wisemiller’s sandwich at Leo’s, they will know where to go.
Interested in applying to be on the Spoon University staff? Email [email protected] for more information.
