Every year, colleges and universities spend approximately $5 billion dollars on food. And the great majority of this money is spent on food that is produced far from where it is consumed using toxic chemicals that impairs the health of workers in the fields, our environment, and consumers.

Luckily, students are beginning to see themselves as more than consumers, increasingly advocating for more local, sustainable, and humane food. Since 2004, the college food service industry has revolutionized due in large part to the efforts of Real Food Challenge (RFC), a coalition of educators and university students across the nation, who desire to create a healthier and greener food system amongst higher education institutions. Through RFC, students are educating and empowering their peers, building relationships with their campus dining corporate representatives as well as small food producers, and negotiating the shift from industrial food dollars to local food dollars with these different stakeholders. 

Our School, Our Food

Southeastern Louisiana University (SELU), a mid-sized, public university in Hammond, LA,represents one university participating in the Real Food Challenge. Starting in 2011, our group, Reconnect–the University’s environmental club–began negotiating with Aramark, the campus’s dining managers, to campaign for more locally grown, sustainable food to be served on campus.

While there was initial interest from the Aramark representatives, they quickly became reluctant and unwilling to meet the students’ goals. Although they met with the students and verbally supported eventually getting local produce, Aramark placed many restrictions on getting that local food into the cafeteria. For example, not only did they refuse to meet with community farmers to discuss options and establish a working relationship (something that RFC considers essential to a fair and sustainable local economy), but also, they did not want to form direct contracts with the farmers. Selling through distributors, as Aramark mandates, would nullify any income gains for the farmers.

Realizing the hesitation of a large corporation to change their operations, we proposed a small start by getting local produce into the salad bar. Already in contact with Indian Springs Cooperative and Pointe Coupee Cooperative–two farming business in  Mississippi and Louisiana, respectively–we worked to supply local produce to the University’s cafeteria. Additionally, the fact that our partners are minority farmers meant that we would be addressing the link between social and environmental justice as minority producers have faced systemic discrimination for a long time, especially in the South.

Nonetheless, as relationships between Aramark and Reconnect students became tense, we decided to take a break from negotiations. Reconnect garnered the help of students in Dr. David Burley’s graduate class in Applied Environmental Sociology and decided to focus more on educating the student body about food system issues  (we engaged in educating the campus about a broad spectrum of food system issues–labor, local economy, environment and health–not just nutrition). Students from Burley’s class spoke in classes across campus and developed attractive educational materials like fliers, information cards, and pamphlets.

Beyond such curricular developments, and with advice from Darlene Wolnik, an experienced market consultant, we decided to host a University farmers market on Oct. 24, 2011–the first national RFC Food Day–in order to cultivate a more hands-on approach to learning about food issues. In concert with education, it was in coordinating the market that Burley’s class was instrumental in assisting Reconnect. The group had recently lost some active members to graduation and Burley’s class helped take some of the pressure off of the remaining students while being able to attract new members through the educational activities and the farmers market.