By Caroline Merrifield
It was a magical dining hall food moment, even better than that one time they served Chinese broccoli and pesto couscous at the same meal. Sitting in our warmly-lit dining hall at the end of a crisp fall day, my friends and I shared fresh salad, autumn soup, roasted squash, cranberry stuffing, and pumpkin pie, all made from sustainable, local, seasonal ingredients in honor of the inauguration of the University’s first female president. At every table, conversations were happening about how good everything was. People were really noticing their food.
In a lot of ways, good-food-minded Harvard students are lucky. The enlightened, independently-run Harvard University Dining Services is fully on board with the Tao of Good Food. The Food Literacy Project, an arm of HUDS, works to educate students about food issues. Our coffee is fair trade, our eggs are cage-free, our Swiss chard is organic. But when the inauguration festivities are over, dinner-table conversation in the dining halls turns to topics other than the virtues of sustainable food. Surveys conducted by HUDS show that students don’t seem to understand or care strongly about issues related to food and sustainability. People love love love “popcorn chicken,” essentially pre-fab environmental kryptonite. They have no deep-seated ideological need to eat lots of root vegetables all winter. There’s only so much Dining Services can do when student pressure is focused elsewhere.
Last year, rising prices caused something of a food crunch. The fair trade bananas and some of the more exciting salad bar selections mysteriously evaporated, and my options as a vegetarian were occasionally limited to French fries, rice, and peas. Things eventually got sorted out, but the e-mail flame fests over house open lists made it abundantly clear that local/sustainable/organic had fallen off the list of top priorities for a lot of other students.
There are plenty of foodies lurking out there, to be sure. A group of us had an awesome time attending the Yale Real Food Summit last fall, and my roommates and I drool over each other’s farmers’ market stories all summer. But as long as the gourmands stand in the corner talking wine and cheese, and the enviros obsess about resource efficiency and carbon footprints, and the global health people think in terms of mosquito netting for faraway countries, and the labor action group retains its uncomfortably radical edge, Good Food is left with nowhere to go. The truth of the matter is that the problem of sustainable food systems can only be discussed intelligently, comprehensively, when all of those issues show up at the same big potluck. And I suspect that Harvard students will continue to abdicate ownership of the sustainable campus food discussion until that happens.
“The truth of the matter is that the problem of sustainable food systems can only be discussed intelligently, comprehensively, when all of those issues show up at the same big potluck.”
Precisely my point – you need to define ’sustainable’. Do you mean economically sustainable? Environmentally sustainable? Sociologically sustainable? While it might be nice to be able to combine these into a green, local, organic, hormone-free, fat-free, sugar-free, vegan, non-cage, fair trade agricultural production system, you need to understand that all these buzzwords often mean lower production yields, and while global resources are dwindling, this cannot ever be considered ’sustainable’.
I respectfully disagree. “Sustainable” IS notoriously hard to pin down and wildly over-applied, but I tend to stick with the general Rio Summit ‘three pillars’ definition (environmental/economic/social sustainability). The most current research demonstrates that diversified, humane, small-scale farm systems are the most sustainable in this sense. While yields may decrease in the first three-ish years of transition from conventional high input, Green Revolution-style agriculture to organic, long-term yields for organic crops are on par with or higher than conventional system yields. Plus, organic systems are just plain better for the environment, enhancing biodiversity and ecosystem services rather than depleting them. The way to feed the world isn’t with more NPK and vast monocultures; we need diverse farms with vegetables, livestock, grains, native prairie and grasses for biofuel stock. We can have our organic, sustainable, fair, local, hormone-free cake and eat it, too.
“All the pests that out of earth arise, the earth itself the antidote supplies.” Lithica c. 400 B.C.
I’m surprised to see Dr. Capper responding to entries on this blog (Who next, Joe Regenstein?). She brings up an interesting point of view that is rarely addressed by posters. Dr. Caper certainly knows the subject, however her research is hard to swallow when it is so closely connected with Monsanto. Her research has been discussed across Cornell e-lists, and could entertain a lively discussion here.