Tuesday evenings from 6:30-8:00pm.
Virtual, unless otherwise noted.

Launched in 2017, Food Literacy for All is a community-academic partnership course based at the University of Michigan. Structured as an evening lecture series, Food Literacy for All features different guest speakers each week to address challenges and opportunities of diverse food systems. The course is free and open to the public.

The University of Michigan Sustainable Food Systems Initiative (SFSI) hosts a unique community-academic partnership course called Food Literacy for All each winter semester. Structured as an evening lecture series, Food Literacy for All features different guest speakers each week to address diverse challenges and opportunities of both domestic and global food systems. By bringing national and global leaders to campus, the course aims to ignite new conversations and deepen existing commitments to building more equitable, health-promoting, and ecologically sustainable food systems.

From 2017-2022, 799 University of Michigan (UM) students have taken Food Literacy for All for credit, over 3,500 community members have attended the class, several hundred people have participated in in-person events in Detroit, and over 34,000 others from across the U.S. and around the world who have engaged through a range of virtual formats, including livestream events in Detroit, Kalamazoo, and East Lansing. The course has had lasting impacts on student learning, community perspectives, and partnerships that have formed among former speakers and with SFSI, and attracted widespread media attention.

Unlike most courses at UM, Food Literacy for All is co-designed, co-planned, and co-taught by a team of UM faculty and staff and community leaders in Detroit. The course team also includes rotating SFSI coordinators, UM graduate student instructors (GSIs), and LSA Technology Services representatives who have supported the course both academically and logistically.