When she was still at Hamilton College, Eunice Lee ’16 made it a point to pursue everything she loved, leading her to majors in environmental studies, with an art focus, and French. It was a mix that might look, to some, rather random.
“It definitely wasn’t until after I was abroad in Paris with Hamilton in France that I saw I was doing something right,” Lee says.
It was there that she learned about the European Union’s food policy and Basque Country culture. From there, Lee secured a Fulbright U.S. student grant, graduated, and went to study at the French National Institute of Agricultural Research in Toulouse, France, where she researched the EU’s food-quality policy and the affect of related regulations on small farming communities.
With her fellowship in the rearview, Lee is working in Athens, Ga., with AmeriCorps VISTA at the University of Georgia’s Campus Kitchen Project. It’s a student-run organization that salvages otherwise wasted food from grocery stores and farmer’s markets and donates it to low-income, food-insecure seniors. “I am very excited about Campus Kitchen’s mission, because I wrote my environmental studies thesis on how Hamilton manages/reduces food waste through, for example, meal donations and composting. So, it's great to be doing the work that I had only wrote about in school,” Lee says.
After AmeriCorps Lee would like to work for a food— or agriculture—related nonprofit. “Overall, I’m interested in food security/justice, sustainable farming, and farmers’ rights, so probably something related to those issues,” says Lee, who suspects grad school may be in her future.
