Well, yes. And it’s a logical move, if they don’t want to see their legacy (or their democracy) go down the toilet. After all, as Mario Batali once pointed out on CBS Sunday Morning, “When you think about it, all my greatest work is poop, tomorrow.”Ah, but not all excrement is created equal. On the one hand, intensive pork production’s given us vast pools of lethally toxic pig shit known as manure lagoons, more akin to radioactive waste than organic manure. On the other hand, there are worm castings, the highly fertile poop extruded by earthworms that looks like coffee grounds and smells pleasantly earthy.

The respective hazards and merits of various manures has not, historically, been the province of the JBF. This highly influential culinary center, founded after the legendary chef and cookbook author James Beard’s death in 1985 at the age of 81, is better known for its awards honoring outstanding chefs, restaurateurs, and writers.

But with the current American diet in such a dire state, the JBF folks are not content to simply celebrate culinary and literary excellence. Eager to play a more proactive role in reshaping our food system, the JBF has come down squarely in favor of a future that features more worm castings and fewer manure lagoons.

The JBF promoted that vision last week with its second annual JBF Food Conference, How Money and Media Influence the Way America Eats. In conjunction with the conference, the JBF also held its inaugural JBF Leadership Awards [PDF], which honored 10 “visionaries in the business, government and education sectors responsible for creating a healthier, safer, and more sustainable food world.”

Fittingly, one of the honorees was vermicomposting genius Will Allen, whose internationally acclaimed nonprofit Growing Power flourishes on a foundation of worm poop.

And while the JBF’s newfound fervor to reform our food chain may seem like a radical departure, it’s really more like a homecoming. James Beard, whose influence led Julia Child to declare him “the Dean of American Cuisine,” was advocating pure, regional, seasonally based home cooking half a century before Alice Waters and Michael Pollan sought to popularize that ideal.

Beard despised the prepackaged convenience foods that had already begun to displace real meals in his heyday. In a letter to his friend Helen Evans Brown in September of 1954, he wrote:

The food editors’ conference is going full tilt and we hear the results are horrifying. Soon, we are told, there will be no fresh foods on the market — just canned or frozen (this came from the lips of the Secretary of Agriculture).

The JBF Food Conference, co-hosted by Good Housekeeping at their conference facility in the LEED gold certified Hearst Tower, brought together chefs, scholars, entrepreneurs, economists, writers, advocates, and representatives from nonprofits and corporations to examine the financial underpinnings of our food system and the media’s role in shaping our food choices.

The goal was to find common ground among people with diverse agendas, and “establish a set of guiding principles around which we can organize and move forward together,” as the conference’s facilitator, Joseph McIntyre, announced at the outset.

McIntyre, president of the California-based think/do tank Ag Innovations Network, came to town a few days early to make a pilgrimage to Zuccotti Park.

I wanted to go down there and see what was going on. And you know what they were talking about? Money and media. I would argue that our friends in the Tea Party are talking about the same things. Underneath the great debate in America today about food, about finance, underneath the polarized positions between Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party, lie common aspirations for the future. How many of you do not want a world that’s better for your children?

The JBF’s Leadership Awards, which offer prestige but no monetary prize, personified the paradoxes that bedevil the good food movement. Michelle Obama, Alice Waters, and the aforementioned Will Allen were obvious shoo-ins, as was Fedele Bauccio, whose Bon Appétit Management Company has been the gold standard when it comes to sustainability in the food service industry.

Other honorees whose bona fides were impeccable included Debra Eschmeyer, the dynamic co-founder of the just-launched FoodCorps; the venerable Fred Kirschenmann, of the Leopold Center For Sustainable Agriculture and Stone Barns; and author/professor Janet Poppendieck, whose books Sweet Charity and Free For All: Fixing School Food in America offer thoughtful analyses on the root causes of hunger in our society and how to reform our shoddy school lunch program.

But the inclusion of executives from Costco, Unilever, and Sysco no doubt surprised some folks. Forbes writer Nadia Arumugam was pleased to see them included. She said:

… witnessing three high-level executives from three large corporations receive awards for their tangible and results-driven efforts to further the sustainable food movement, was surprising, but extremely heartening.

This is where the pragmatists and the purists collide. As Naomi Klein told Civil Eats, “The food movement is inherently anti-corporate and it is inherently about rebuilding a real economy.”

In honoring corporations who are making incremental changes that merit our support, the JBF challenges that assumption. And what are we to make of the partnerships that two of the honorees, Michelle Obama and Will Allen, have forged with Walmart?

It’s a dilemma that James Beard would have understood. As David Kamp noted in The United States of Arugula, Beard labeled himself a “gastronomic whore” after entering into an endorsement deal with Green Giant to tout their Corn Niblets and wax beans in his recipes:

In his heart, Beard knew that lending his name to processed foods was a betrayal of his core beliefs in seasonality and regionality … but his cooking school required a lot of money to operate, and his ever-increasing number of writing commitments required a full-time retinue of testers and ghostwriters.

Where does compromise end and co-option begin? As Walt Whitman famously said, “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”

Originally posted on Grist

Helene York is both an educator and coach for Bon Appétit Management Company, the socially responsible food service company that operates more than 400 on-site cafés for universities, corporate employers, and museums in 31 states. She is also the director of the Bon Appétit Management Company Foundation, whose mission is to educate chefs and consumers about how their food choices affect the global environment and to catalyze changes in the supply chain.

Helene conceived and helped launch Bon Appétit’s Low Carbon Diet program in 2007. The goal of the program is twofold: To raise awareness of the connection between the food system and climate change and to reduce emissions associated with Bon Appétit’s food service operations by 25 percent over five years. To date, the program has achieved reductions by approximately five million pounds of CO2 equivalent emissions each month.

In 2010 she was named a Seafood Champion by Seafood Choices Alliance for her steadfast commitment to sustainable seafood on a global level. Since 2009 Helene has been a regular contributor to the Life channel of the Atlantic Monthly online and a frequent guest lecturer at universities across the country on the subject of the food system’s relationship to climate change.

What issues have you been focused on?

Last summer we successfully challenged our chefs to sign up our 1,000th Farm to Fork vendor, representing tremendous growth since we launched this program way back in 1999—long before the word “locavore” had been coined, let alone become a buzzword. I’m really proud that we work with so many small, local, independently operated farms and artisans.

But we’re finding that the criteria we currently use to define “small” (under $5 million in sales) and “local” (within 150 miles of our cafés) can be limiting, especially when it comes to protein. I’ve found owner-operated, humane-certified chicken farms, for example, that have more than $5 million in sales per year but are featherweights compared to the Big Birds of poultry. Should they be excluded from our Farm to Fork program? Currently they are. So we’re looking at how we keep the integrity of the program if we were to widen the definition. I’m also examining what “local” means for fish. “Good Choice” albacore tuna might be landed in Portland, but if it was caught 1,000 miles out to sea, can Oregonians really call it a “locally caught” fish?

What inspires you to do this work?

I see myself as supporting 500 chefs who are committed to making so-called “institutional food” taste great and be healthy. Some of them are responsible for feeding thousands of people every day. My job is to help them source foods as responsibly as possible and give them tools to push wherever they can. Lots of them have helped medium-size farmers and ranchers change their practices by nudging them toward a third-party certification of humane practices or reduced pesticide usage. It so makes my day to hear those stories of making change.

What’s your overall vision?

Food that is prized more and wasted less. Foodsheds that are regional in nature and not dependent on a few enormous global actors. Persuading some of the bigger players to make meaningful changes in their food production and distribution practices—to use radically fewer chemicals, treat their workers and animals well, keep nutrients in basic foods instead of injecting additives later, and use “natural” food waste to replenish the land rather than add to the landfill.

What books and/or blogs are you reading right now?

I’m reading an advance copy of Barry Estabrook’s Tomatoland about the absolutely insane Florida tomato industry. Insane from an environmental standpoint because the natural sandy soil can’t support growing commodity tomatoes in Florida and there’s so far to go to make the labor conditions there truly humane.

I’m also nearly done with Tom Standage’s A History of the World in Six Glasses (2005), a fascinating romp through millennia of beer, wine, tea, and cola drinking that shows humanity’s tendency to commodify foodstuffs and trade it globally. These aren’t new phenomena.

Who’s in your community?

Everyone from prep cooks learning to use vegetable trimmings for stock and weigh their kitchen waste, to NGOs looking for business leadership to buy certain products or speak out in favor of a public policy, to suppliers of every stripe who claim environmental benefits of their “eco-friendly” products. I support the first two; I bust the third.

What are your commitments?

Personally, I don’t eat meat, even though I’m on the board of Humane Farm Animal Care and visit ranchers often who do a tremendous job. I respect what they do, but I feel very strongly about meat’s impact on climate change and its overuse of natural resources per calories delivered compared to other foods. Plus piglets are awfully darn adorable! It’s hard not to think about that when I think about food for a living.

Professionally—well, Bon Appétit has a very long list of commitments. In addition to the Farm to Fork Program we launched in 1999, we’ve addressed the overuse of antibiotics, sustainable seafood, cage-free eggs, the connection between food and climate change, and most recently, farmworkers’ rights. And we now source Fair Trade-certified baking chocolate for our kitchens. We’re the first food service company to do so.

What are your goals?

It’s natural for me to think about chef goals and I’m so delighted when I hear them talk about how they changed their menus to reflect our Low Carbon Diet principles. This isn’t “my” project anymore. It’s theirs! They’re the ones making it happen on the ground every day. But my goal is to reach all the line cooks in the kitchens, like the ladies I met in Washington, DC, who are proud to be feeding healthy food to students, and taking those lessons home to their own kids and grandkids. I spent much of a week last year alongside cooks in one of our kitchens to know what it’s all about. When I think about initiatives, I think about reaching them.

What does change look like to you?

Change means redefining lunch on a national scale. Sandwich options at most places are so limited: Turkey, grilled chicken, roast beef, or an under-cooked eggplant slice with red pepper, all of which hide under a block of factory-processed cheese, a tasteless pink tomato slice, and piece of wilted lettuce. Many ethnic options are similarly homogenous: How often do you see actual vegetables in a “veggie burrito” and why do burritos have to weigh a pound and a half, anyway? Change means caring enough to put these scenarios out of business, having responsible meat as optional toppings, a wide variety of fresh seasonal produce options, and reasonable quantities.

Regarding the practicalities of enacting change, what planning is involved? What kind of outreach?

The supply chain for a big company does not change quickly. We spent two years creating the Low Carbon Diet and then established a five-year timeline starting from launch in 2007. Some goals were met early (we committed to reducing beef purchases by 25 percent in two years but hit a 33 percent reduction during that time) and others, like completely eliminating air-freighted seafood, have been hampered by a lack of transparency in our suppliers’ reporting systems. Every change effort requires buy-in from many people—chefs, managers, suppliers—and everyone’s busy. Our initiative isn’t their top priority that day; making lunch for 3,000 is. I’ve got to make sure that I express our goals in a way that anticipates their questions and needs and is reasonable. It’s also important to give everyone a sense that the project is part of a larger vision, connected to an idea bigger than all of us, and that we can help bring about through our individual actions.

What projects are affiliated with yours?

We have worked closely with a number of independent organizations to guide our purchasing policies and renew our intellectual underpinnings for them over the years, including Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) for the antibiotics-reduction policies that guide our meat purchasing; Humane Society of the U.S. (HSUS) and Humane Farm Animal Care (HFAC) for our egg purchasing policy; The Monterey Bay Aquarium and Ocean Conservancy for seafood; Fair Trade USA for coffee, tea, bananas and a program under development; and Ecotrust on the Low Carbon Diet, among others.

What projects and people have you got your eye on or are you impressed by?

The grass-roots movement around urban agriculture springing up in so many corners of the country. Preliminary academic research is showing that many small, diversified programs in inner cities are more environmentally efficient than many rural operations in terms of energy, water, and transportation use. They offer the added benefit of teaching a new generation of young consumers about seasonality, respect for farming, and that fresh-picked, unprocessed peas tastes a lot better than frozen peas.

Where do you see the state of agriculture/food policy in the next 5-10 years? Is real policy change a real possibility?

I think we have to be vigilant and patient at the same time and despite how oxymoronic that sounds: Vigilant about pushing for progress, but patient because this is going to take a long time. The current food system took 150 years to develop, much of it with federal support: Railroad infrastructure and refrigerated box cars brought us uniform beef; aquaducts and canal systems brought us industrial agriculture; state-by-state approaches to regulating agriculture have given us a patchwork of environmental and labor laws that fail to protect workers, waterways, and soil in much of the country. We’ll achieve change if we focus on the big things and recognize that full-scale change can only happen in a generation at the earliest.

What does the food movement need to do, be or have to be more effective?

Every successful movement for change—the Civil Rights Movement is a great example—included many personalities and a variety of agendas, but the ultimate goals were few and clear—and took decades to realize success. Food activists ultimately need to rally around a few well-articulated priorities and reduce the fussing that will dissipate our collective strength. I liked Tom Philpott’s only half-joking proposal to form a Vegan/Omnivore Alliance Against Animal Factories. Michelle Obama’s campaign to combat childhood obesity is bringing together strange bedfellows behind an important cause, but many committed activists prefer to scorn the efforts because big business has signed on or it doesn’t go far enough. In my view, this a huge step right now in the right direction. We need to examine what our primary goals and our long-term “non-negotiables” should be so we can measure progress toward achieving them.

What would you want to be your last meal on earth?

A traditional kaiseki ryori, multi-course Japanese meal using seasonable vegetables and fresh, sustainable seafood, including really fishy fish such as oysters, mackerel, uni and sardines.

Chocolate. For many of us, the sight, aroma and tongue coating decadence are enough to send the brain’s pleasure receptors into overdrive. Seemingly always prized, it has been used over hundreds of years as an offering in religious ceremonies, a currency, and often reserved for the ruling elite. Interest in chocolate often borders on obsession, so much so, that the botanical name for the cacao plant, Theobroma cacao, means “food of the Gods.” Those who testified to the chocolate gospel helped spread it around the world and it has since come to bring simple pleasure to citizens far and wide, high and low across the planet.

Sadly, however, there is a dark side to chocolate that many consumers are often blissfully unaware of, or deliberately chose to ignore. Cacao is grown predominantly on small family farms in a narrow tropical band around the equator. While a handful of massive global corporations control and profit handsomely from the worldwide chocolate trade, millions of cacao farmers and their families toil in poverty year after year and deforestation is widespread. Worse still, child slavery tragically persists, despite reputable international reports that surfaced over a decade ago–in particular highlighting the world’s largest exporter of cocoa, the Ivory Coast.

Mindful of the unbearable social and environmental costs endemic to the current chocolate trade, and concluding that the industry doesn’t have the resolve to create material positive change, many courageous folks are responding with a different approach. Fair Trade, Direct Trade, Profit Sharing, Co-ops, and Bean to Bar are among many alternatives being pursued.

On Tuesday, February 22, 2010 at 6:45 pm at Viracocha in San Francisco, Kitchen Table Talks will host an intimate gathering with some industry leaders to discuss the issues. Joining us in the conversation will be:

Brett Beach: Inspired in part by his work with the Peace Corps in Madagascar, Brett co-founded Madecasse in 2006. Its unique mission is to partner with cacao farmers and other community members to make world-class chocolate right on the island. They believe this Bean-to-Bar model has four times more economic benefit than selling beans at Fair Trade prices alone.

Christine Doerr: After graduating from the California Culinary Academy and various stints as a pastry chef, Christine made the leap to pursue her own truffle business. After being accepted into San Francisco’s La Cocina incubator program in 2008, Neo Cocoa was born.

Adrienne Fitch-Frankel: Adrienne has worked for diverse human rights and environmental advocacy organizations and is currently the Fair Trade Campaign Director for Global Exchange in San Francisco. Her area of expertise is the impact of commodities, both extractive and agricultural, on local communities.

John Kehoe: In various capacities, John’s work has been dedicated to the procurement and marketing of specialty cocoa, working closely with farmers, exporters, importers, and chocolate manufacturers since 1991. Founder of the specialty cocoa brokerage “EcoTrade” in 2002, John is currently the VP of Sourcing and Development for Tcho in San Francisco.

Carlos Mann: Born in Nicaragua, Carlos was a lifelong illustrator/designer until 2005 when he founded The Momotombo Chocolate Factory. He is the founder of OMETEOTE, a cacao education initiative that works to empower Nicaraguan cacao farmers and regular folks alike with marketable traditional Mesoamerican chocolate making skills. Carlos has lived in Costa Rica, India, and is an ex-S.F. Mission district resident.

Special Note: Fair Trade chocolate pastry will be graciously prepared by Jim Dodge of Bon Appétit Management Company. Jim is a revered pastry chef, teacher, cookbook author, and currently serves as the Director of Special Culinary Programs at Bon Appétit.

Please note: Please join us at 6:45 pm, an earlier than normal start time, for a brief segment from the award-winning documentary “Slavery: A Global Investigation,” a harrowing look into modern day slavery in the chocolate industry based on the groundbreaking work of Kevin Bales, author of Disposable People.

Special and sincere thanks to Haven Bourque of HavenBMedia, a media relations firm based in Oakland, and Sunita de Tourreil of The Chocolate Garage, an education and retail shop in Palo Alto, for their help in preparing this talk.

Tuesday, February 22, 2010

Viracocha, 998 Valencia Street @ 21st Street, San Francisco

Food and drink at 6:15 pm; Film and Discussion at 6:45 pm

Kitchen Table Talks is a joint venture of CivilEats and 18 Reasons, a non-profit that promotes conversation between its San Francisco Mission neighborhood and the people who feed them. Space is limited, so please RSVP. Due to a high level of no-shows, we ask that you kindly respect those in our community who are truly able to attend. Please RSVP with consideration.

A $10 suggested donation is requested at the door, but no one will be turned away for lack of funds. Sustainable food and refreshments will be provided, courtesy of Bi-Rite Market and Shoe Shine Wine.

A blogger thought yelling was an inappropriate reaction when I learned that one of our chefs posted a bluefin tuna recipe. (Yelling is bad, but calling someone an eco-Nazi isn’t?) Hey, I’m from Brooklyn. I’m not quiet and I’m going to let you know what I think. But there’s a method to my (loud-mouthed) madness.

Bon Appétit serves 120 million meals a year and our food purchasing policies can cause some big ripples in the supply chain. Lots of bloggers gripe that sustainable food tenets impinge upon their freedoms. They want to eat whatever they want. Fine. But don’t mistake a food company’s corporate purchasing policies as a judgment of individual behavior. That’s missing the point. The point is that it absolutely matters what 400 chefs serve and what foods they endorse.

Maybe one of our chefs, Thom Fox, said it best in his comment to blogger John Birdsall: 

No one should feel guilty about the occasional spicy tuna roll. But you’re responsible for one mouth; I’m responsible for thousands. And the economies of scale that Bon Appétit’s purchasing decisions create make it critical that we make the right decisions. One of my colleagues is the chef at University of San Francisco; he feeds around 8,000 people every day. See what I mean by impact?

Let’s agree that there are arguments at the margins about what “sustainable food” means, or how to measure progress toward that end. Legitimate disagreements. But no one who knows anything about ocean science can claim that bluefin tuna is sustainable in any way. Though don’t doubt for a minute that a seafood supplier once tried to argue with me on that one. And yes, I yelled at him too. The company I work for has had a very strict and very public sustainable seafood policy for eight years. Chefs work for us because they agree with our policies and know we stand by them.

A big part of my job is to educate new chefs about what sustainable seafood means, share new information with all chefs, and work with suppliers to make sure that what they’re selling meets our standards. I also review purchasing reports monthly and coach chefs whenever I see errors. Shouldn’t a credible policy be backed up with monitoring? Who needs policies that aren’t internally enforced?

With over 400 cafes served by more than 30 seafood suppliers, our company expects a few errors—suppliers have been known to mislabel and exaggerate from time to time, and Federal regulations concerning traceability in seafood are insufficient—but some errors are simply egregious. Bluefin tuna and shark fins are the apex of our unsustainable industrial fishing system. There’s just no excuse for serving them or even posting recipes for them.

I applaud individuals who take the time to learn about their food choices and make principled decisions. As our CEO Fedele Bauccio recently wrote for Huffington Post: “You get to vote with your fork three times a day. You either vote for filth and disease, or for clean animals and good health.” For us, take those three squares and multiply by tens of millions—then you’ll understand why strong purchasing policies, large-scale changes in supply chains, and adherence to good policies are the only way we’re going to move the needle toward a national sustainable food system that’s not a fringe concern. Policies matter. Credibility matters even more.

To be more exact, she’s making some heads roll because I found a recipe for bluefin tuna posted on one of our cafe’s Web sites. It’s not like every dish, on every Web site, at every cafe can be policed, seeing that we have over 400 cafes equipped with fiercely autonomous chefs. But clearly, Helene expects more from our chefs—a lot more.

I feel sort of bad for the chef in question, but am relieved to hear I didn’t get the poor guy fired. It would be unfair, considering that just two days prior, I’d have been happily munching my bluefin tuna sushi without a second thought. But for two days straight, I’ve been immersing myself in the world of “Helene the Seafood Queen,” ravenously digesting the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch Guidelines, PBS documentaries that make me cry at my desk for fish and fisherman alike, and the haunting article “Tuna’s End” in New York Magazine (an excerpt from Paul Greenberg’s new book, Four Fish).

Two days ago seems like a lifetime ago.

You might think that I am a babe in the woods when it comes to sustainable food. I wish I could claim that I didn’t know arugula from my asparagus when I started this job, but that would be a big fat lie. The fact is, I’m the founder of a sustainable, educational urban farm and have been working in academia and non-profits in the intersecting fields of nutrition, food system change, and sustainable agriculture for close to a decade.

This is my first and only corporate job. And even though I did my homework about Bon Appétit’s long-standing commitment to sustainability before accepting their offer, I was still pretty nervous coming in. After all, we food activists are universally convinced that corporations are incapable of being part of the solution, and that real activists don’t “do” corporate work.

I held that belief walking in the door on my first day. I kept wondering: How long before I will be asked to compromise my values? How long before I realize that it’s all just a song and dance? An inner voice was admonishing me for daring to go to work for “The Man.”

I certainly never guessed that Bon Appétit would have anything to teach me about living or eating sustainably; I was pretty darn convinced that I was there to teach them how it’s done. After a month on the job, I’m starting to come to terms with my new employer’s seriousness about moving the needle in the foodservice industry. I’m also coming to terms with my own blind spots: fish, water, farmworker’s rights. I’m sure there are more. It’s funny, I spend so much of my time, energy, and heart working to help small farms thrive and to educate kids—including my own daughter—about growing, cooking, and eating for the future. And yet, my experiences at Bon Appétit have humbled me.

My first week also brought dinner with my new coworkers. We all cooked, each of us taking one element of an impressive five-course meal. Talk about humbling experiences, as I strived to keep up with a roomful of sustainable chefs. Think of an episode of Top Chef where the judges throw the self-taught cooks to the wolves. Then, cut the counter space in half.  My nectarine crisp wasn’t topped with cucumber-essence whip cream or plated with a swirl of raspberry coulis, but it was pretty darn good. One of our chefs, Kim Triplett, debuted a new recipe that night: Pacific halibut (Seafood Watch’s “best choice”) with curried fennel and pear. Even though I don’t consider myself much of a fish eater, I broke down and asked her to share the recipe with me, after trying (and failing) to reverse-engineer the dish. I’m grateful that my newfound love of seafood is paired with newfound knowledge of sustainable choices.

Since taking this job, I’ve resolved to become aware of my own shortcomings, and of learning new things in unexpected places. I’m not saying I’ll never roll my eyes again when a company tells me how “green” they are, but I also won’t ever think of such claims in the same way. In a sense, I’m more up in arms than ever. I’ve learned that this movement sometimes places more value on “street cred” than actual information, and that I’m guilty of helping to cultivate this selective dismissiveness. I’ve learned that false claims made by unscrupulous companies can damage the reputations of the corporations that are actually making progress. I’ve realized how difficult it is for corporate advocates to enter the sustainable food conversation, no matter how much they might have to say.

Watching Helene York explode into action to come to the aid of some tuna fish? That taught me a lot more than the warning, “Don’t eat bluefin.” It taught me that passion is contagious, and that we all need to continually inspire one another and support what everyone’s doing right in order to really turn the tide (pun intended) in our oceans, on our farms, and with our children.

Most college campuses have land to spare — and now as farming has become a focus of interest for students, and willing participants are lining up to volunteer their time planting, weeding and harvesting across the US, there couldn’t be a better time to think about starting a farm on campus. The idea behind the guide was to empower students to harness this momentum, showing step-by-step how to start a campus farm, as well as providing students with resources for seasonal planning, maintaining relationships with buyers, food safety, building community around the garden, and forming composting partnerships so that it continues to thrive.

One of the most successful university farm-to-lunchroom projects is the Yale Sustainable Food Project, which began in 2001 after students began pushing for better food in their lunchrooms. I wrote the director of the project, Melina Shannon-DiPietro, because I wanted to get an idea of what is possible for a student farm, even on a small plot in the northeast, and to ask her how this program has affected the campus community. This is what she had to say:

The farm is one-acre, and the produce grown at the farm is shared with volunteers, sold at farmers market, and tops pizza from our wood-burning hearth oven. In one year, this one acre inspired nearly 30 interns to make 1,500 pizzas in our brick oven, more than 1,300 students to volunteer during afternoon workdays, and more than 300 community members and school children to get their hands dirty. Another 600 students visited the farm for events like a pig roast and a harvest festival. We grow 300 varieties of vegetables, fruit, flowers, and herbs, and we grow in all 4 seasons. One of the most exciting numbers last year is that over 850 students took courses related to food and agriculture. Students are hungry for this work.

The farm is an entry point for students to become involved in other initiatives involving food, agriculture, and the environment. Students talk about how important the Yale Farm is to them as a space to learn with their hands and minds, a place to enjoy long conversations with friends while working, and a place to spend time outdoors and develop a connection to land and food. They also tell us that the Yale Farm is the place where they  first connect the dots and understand that the way we live is a political act, an ethical act, and even, today, part of a movement.

Each of these gardens around the nation can teach students what good food means – what tastes good, what’s good for our health, what’s good for farmers and for the land, and what’s good for our communities.  These gardens can teach our children to be better learners by opening their senses, to be environmental stewards by connecting them to the land, and to be better citizens by connecting them to community.

Sounds terrific, right? So as the school year begins in this period of new thinking on agriculture, here is a tool that students can use. Besides the vital world of books, an opportunity awaits to get dirty and produce food — right outside of your dorm room. It is a chance to build a community on campus around food, while turning the tide on a corporate-dominated food system that is making us sick.