Redesigning Our Future

Students are Eager to Try Kudzu Food and Drink High school students in Dr. Jay Bolin's group Invasive Alien Plants and Animals: Friend or Foe to the Environment? always enjoy the kudzu class. Why? Well, they get to eat and drink kudzu concoctions.  Granted kudzu has a bad name, and it has certainly caused a lot of headaches for a lot of people. Brought in to counter soil erosion, this plant quickly became an invasive plant that would crawl over and tangle up plants, trees, and old broken down cars sitting in the field. Fighting it back has been like trying to stick your elbow in your ear. Given it's hard to impossible to do much about kudzu, students learn to make the best of a bad situation. The campers go out hiking and pick young kudzu leaves and then get to cooking. One favorite is fried kudzu leaves. Students make and eat these in their focus group meetings. The kudzu leaves are battered and deep fried. This is quite a southern tradition. Most anyone from t...

How to Drink the Environmentally Friendly Way By Emily Pieper On the first day we arrived here at Redesigning 2012 , each of us received a plastic cup (seen in the center of the photo above) to use throughout the week. What's neat about these cups is that they are reusable, and they can hold any kind of drink. This was a great idea, because every hour in America approximately 2.5 million plastic bottles are thrown away! Not only do these nifty cups help us stay hydrated throughout the day, but they allow us to be environmentally friendly in the process. The insulated, reusable drinking cups were donated for the "Redesigning the Future" summit for high school students by Rowan Regional Medical Center .