5. Eat food that nourishes farmers and the land.

Fruit in Stav Dining Hall

At St. Olaf, we eat well, but we don't yet eat sustainably, in part because the American food system makes sustainability difficult, if not impossible. The cafeteria, therefore, is a good place to teach students about the problem of invisible complexity, because it shows literally how the college puts its money where our mouths are. When Bon Appetit buys food for us, they reinforce some American values and marginalize others. Food purchasing policies, therefore, are institutional expressions of value. For the most part, colleges don't value these values enough to consider them very carefully. Most colleges tell their foodservices, either explicitly or implicitly, that they want good food for a low price. So purchasing policies often tend toward the bottom line. The foodservice looks for dependable suppliers whose economies of scale allow them to provide economies of sale. Usually, these suppliers are intimately connected to the American industrial food system, with all its advantages and disadvantages.

Bon Appetit, a California-based food service company, supplies the food for our students in Stav Hall, serving about 30,000 meals a week during the school year. At the national level, Bon Appetit is committed to serving fresh food; creating menus with lots of fruits, vegetables, legumes and grains; purchasing from regional food producers and artisans; purchasing produce that is locally grown, seasonal, and minimally processed; contributing to local food banks; purchasing seafood that preserves healthy fish supplies; boycotting businesses that violate farmworkers' rights to good working and living conditions; offering fair-trade, shade-grown, and organic coffees; testing biodegradable disposables; and recycling packaging whenever possible. Most recently, working with Environmental Defense, the company announced a new policy of using its purchasing power to buy only chicken that has been produced without the routine use of medically important antibiotics, and to prefer meat, dairy and seafood that have been produced with reduced amounts of antibiotics. And they have ended purchases of fish-farm salmon, restricting purchases to wild, line-caught salmon.

Peace coffee in Stav Dining Hall

Bon Appetit's environmental ethic is also present at the local level. Company policy provides considerable autonomy to on-site chefs managers for making all decisions about menus and procurement. At St. Olaf, General Manager Hays Atkins buys apples and corn in season, and procures all of the cafeteria's pasta from a North Dakota farmers' cooperative. He has also begun conversations to purchase beef and pork locally, to acquire hormone-free and antibiotic-free milk, and to equip the Lion's Cage with compostable plates and cutlery.

The food in St. Olaf's cafeteria allows students to make healthy, nutritious choices, as suggested by the USDA's Food Guide Pyramid. Bon Appetit provides a variety of foods in the major food groups. Caf workers offer food in moderate serving sizes, so that students aren't encouraged to overeat. And the menus include higher proportions of foods at the bottom of the USDA food pyramid (grains and vegetables) than at the top (meats, dairy products, sweets)

There are several environmental advantages to St. Olaf's current dining arrangement. There are lots of good choices at each meal, and most stations include meatless choices. In the pasta line, for example, you can almost always get a meatless sauce. In the Oriental line, you can invariably get tofu or vegetables with your rice or noodles. In addition, there's a dedicated vegetarian line, with options for vegans as well. ¹

Bon Appetit tries to procure foods that are good for people and their environment. Thanks to creative conversations between St. Olaf student Katie Harrod, the Environmental Coalition, and Bon Appetit, shade-grown, fair-trade Peace Coffee is available both in Stav Hall and the Cage. The "Farm to Fork" program is working with the Southeast Minnesota Food Network to arrange for purchase of meat from grass-fed animals raised without the use of hormone injections or antibiotics. Bon Appetit is also working to find the requisite 300 gallons of milk a day from dairies whose cows are not treated with bovine growth hormone. The "Farm to Fork" program aims to purchase organically certified fruits and vegetables from local farmers, providing high quality menu items to students while contributing to the local business community. Given the Minnesota growing season, this isn't possible most of the year.

Bon Appetit also tries to minimize waste in food preparation and service. Small-batch preparation means that food is fresh, but also that there's less food waste at the end of a meal

A food pulper in the dishroom removes water from the food waste, and reduces the volume and weight of plate waste.

Table in Stav Hall

St. Olaf uses durable tableware in Stav Hall, so there are no disposable plates, cups, etc. During the 2003-04 school year, Bon Appetit put napkins on the tables so that students would only take them if they needed them. Until this year, Bon Appetit used plastic plates and utensils in the Lion's Cage, but St. Olaf soon will be one of the beta-test sites for new line of biodegradable plates and cutlery, which can be composted with the cafeteria's food waste as well.

Even with this good work in purchasing and preparing food, most of our students are still like those at Penn State: "unconnected to the food they eat and the land it comes from, often consuming foods out of season, from thousands of miles away, and unaware of the ecological and social implications of its production." They eat healthy food, but it's not always the result of a healthy food and agricultural system. ²

That's because, when we fork food into our mouths in Stav Hall, we're taking part in the cycles of American agriculture, which are an environmental disaster. Even The Economist , a conservative English publication that believes that advocates market-based solutions to most problems, contends that "If modern agriculture were invented today, it probably wouldn't be allowed. It pollutes the environment with pesticides, fertilisers and nutrients from feed and animal waste. Farming damages wild habitats and domesticated animals are stocked at high densities and pumped full of growth hormones and antibiotics, with the result that they are often unhealthily fatty compared with their wild relatives." And it sucks up energy like it was going out of style—which it is. Americans use about ten times more fossil-fuel energy producing food (including farming, food processing, packaging, transportation, storage, etc.) than the caloric content of the food itself. ³

Bon Appetit and St. Olaf have made a good beginning trying to reform the system from within, but there's still a lot of work to do.

¹ For a good summary of the environmental impacts of meat, see

²Penn State Indicators, p. 44.

³ "A New Way to Feed the World," The Economist ( 9 August 2003 ): 9; Penn State Indicators, p. 42.