Reclaiming Our Food by Cobb Tanya Denckla

Author:Cobb,Tanya Denckla
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Storey Publishing
Published: 2011-07-09T16:00:00+00:00

Universities Take a Bite into Local

One of the first campus campaigns for local food was initiated by a concerned parent – who happened to be chef Alice Waters of San Francisco’s award-winning Chez Panisse restaurant. Waters had founded the Edible Schoolyard garden at a middle school in Berkeley, California, in 1995 and was a recognized champion and veteran at introducing fresh food into schools. When she approached Yale University president Richard Levin in 2001, he agreed to offer locally grown food at the Berkeley undergraduate residential college where her daughter was enrolled. Accomplishing the unimaginable, Berkeley transitioned to a menu of entirely sustainable and, when possible, organic ingredients. Berkeley College’s website notes that its dining hall is “perhaps the most envied on campus” and had a role “in founding and developing the Yale Sustainable Food Project, which revolutionized food service at Yale with national acclaim.”154 The food at Berkeley College became so popular that students reportedly used fake IDs to get into its dining hall,155 leading the university to extend its menu to other Yale dining halls. Yale’s Sustainable Food Project has since expanded to host a farm, internships on the farm, and an academic concentration in sustainable food for environmental studies majors.

Brown University’s acclaimed university dining program began in 2002 with a student request for fair-trade coffee. Virginia Dunleavy, associate director of dining services, decided that, while Brown couldn’t afford fair trade, the university could begin to buy more local produce.156 Dunleavy launched Community Harvest, a “commitment to socially and environmentally sustainable purchasing practices,” as its mission statement says, which has expanded over the years and today does guarantee that all campus coffees and teas are fair-trade certified.

In 2004 Brown hired Louella Hill to champion the cause of bringing more local food into its dining hall. As is the case for universities today, Hill and Dunleavy faced the logistical challenges of serving an incredibly large population (at the time amounting to 1.5 million meals a year) while finding ways to incorporate food from small, local farms.157 But Hill was stubborn and creative. When she wanted to serve local milk in Brown’s dining hall, she faced the daunting barrier of stainless-steel milk dispensers that required 5-gallon bags, not the ½-gallon bags provided by the newly formed local dairy cooperative, Rhody Fresh. So the Brown dining hall agreed to put the Rhody Fresh milk cartons out on ice until the co-op could fix the packaging issue.158 The university dining contract was a huge boost for the fledgling dairy cooperative. Most dairy farmers in the state had already sold out, cashing in on the high value of their land. “As a Rhode Island dairy farmer, I’m an endangered species,” said Louis Escobar, president of the Rhody Fresh co-op, in an interview with the Chicago Tribune. “[The Brown contract has] been like a shot of antibiotics for a sick animal.”159

Hill also helped open a direct line of communication between growers and chefs by cofounding the Farm Fresh Rhode Island collaborative. Today, much like

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