Students lead charge for Local & Organic Foods

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Local foods flavor college cafeterias Push is on to serve students healthy fare produced near campus
By Andrew Martin Chicago Tribune national correspondent

Published April 24, 2005

PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- Louella Hill has found a sure-fire method for spreading her passion for locally grown food to students at her alma mater, Brown University: She has produced a calendar, titled "Ripe," that features naked students posing with strategically placed Rhode Island-grown kale, alfalfa sprouts, mushrooms and other produce.

April, for instance, features three hairy young men posing with a dozen stalks of asparagus. October shows an anonymous torso covered with
cranberries. And August displays the bare bottoms of the Brown girls' soccer team with sliced cantaloupes nestled in the smalls of their backs.

"It's the right age to ask people to take their clothes off," said Hill, who said about 70 students volunteered to pose in the buff.

While the calendars have been a hit at Brown, so too have the fruits and vegetables, thanks to Hill, who was hired last summer to bring more local food into the university's dining halls. Since then, students have swarmed the Rhode Island apples, and they've warmed up to fare like edamame.

If the cafeteria food is locally grown, Hill said, "it flies."

College cafeterias have long been the domain of macaroni and cheese, fried seafood nuggets and mystery meat. But Brown is among a growing number of colleges and universities offering students food grown by local farmers. The trend has been fueled in part by idealistic students who want to curb globalization and support local farmers, and those used to shopping at Whole Foods and farmers markets with their parents.

But it has also been driven by universities that see the local purchases as good public relations in the neighboring community and a way to improve cafeteria food. `Taste the difference' "The increase in satisfaction was huge," said Melina Shannon-DiPietro, associate director of the Yale Sustainable Food Project, which buys local food for Yale students. "Students can taste the difference, and workers were saying the same thing: `We don't want to go back to frozen beef patties.'" At Middlebury College in Vermont, nearly a quarter of the food comes from local farmers, from milk to maple syrup. At Kenyon College in Ohio, students regularly gnaw on burgers from local cows. At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, cafeterias serve organic zucchini, green beans, tomatoes and carrots grown by graduate students in an on-campus garden.

Even the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls is serving locally produced grub.

"This is not an East Coast-West Coast kind of environment," said Kamyar Enshayan, a faculty member at Northern Iowa who got the local food initiative under way. "It's an ordinary place that's trying to connect to the farms near them."

The Farm to College programs, as they are collectively known, are part of a larger "Buy Local" movement to encourage consumers and institutions to purchase food from local farmers, as opposed to shopping at grocery stores and wholesalers that tend to buy food from all points of the world. Proponents of Buy Local campaigns argue that purchasing local food protects the environment by slashing the distance food is transported, and helps family farms in a cutthroat agricultural environment. Ultimately, they envision an alternative food network that avoids global food markets and industrial-sized farms altogether.

While the participants in Farm to College programs represent a small percentage of the nation's approximately 2,500 four-year colleges and universities, their numbers are growing fast enough to attract the attention of food-service giants like Aramark and Sodexho, both of which are offering locally produced food at some of the campus cafeterias they manage.

An estimated 200 colleges and universities have programs to incorporate locally grown food into their student dining programs, said Kristen Markley, who oversees the Farm to College program for the Community Food Security Coalition, a not-for-profit group devoted to creating local food networks. Many of the programs are initiated by students who want more organic food on the campus menu, and some schools like Wisconsin and Yale try to incorporate organic and locally produced food into their menus. But in many cases, school officials choose locally produced food over organic because it tends to be cheaper and, as Markley and others argue, supporting local farms is more important than supporting distant organic farms.

Some programs have been propelled by the participation of famous chefs.

Alice Waters, proprietor of California's award-winning Chez Panisse restaurant, persuaded Yale President Richard Levin in 2001 to offer locally grown food in Berkeley College, one of Yale's 12 undergraduate residential colleges. Waters' daughter, Fanny, attends Yale.

Programs come at a cost The Yale program has been so successful that students have tried using fake IDs to get into Berkeley's dining hall. But it has also come at a cost. Shannon-DiPietro said the food budget at Berkeley has doubled, a problem that was resolved when an anonymous Yale graduate--and a fan of Alice Waters--donated money to cover the additional expenses.

Brown University is attempting a similar concept on a grander scale, using a shoestring budget and without the benefit of a celebrity chef.

Two years ago, a group of students approached Virginia Dunleavy, associate director of dining services, and requested Fair Trade coffee in the cafeteria; such coffee is certified to ensure coffee farmers around the world receive a fair price. That idea was rejected as too expensive, but what came out of their discussions was a tentative plan to bring more local produce to the university's dining halls.

A farmers market was started in the school quad. Rhode Island apples were offered in the cafeterias. And when the chef dismissed the idea of local corn as too much work, Dunleavy organized a "Shuck Off" so students would perform the task. But Brown's local food initiative didn't really get going until last summer when Hill was hired.

Though only 24, Hill had been in training for the job for years. A native of Bisbee, Ariz., she cooked her way through a Betty Crocker cookbook when she was 10. When she arrived at Brown in 1999, Hill said she struggled to find courses that matched her interest in what she terms "agro-ecology." After spending a year in Italy making pecorino cheese and dining almost entirely on food from local farms, Hill returned to Brown and wrote her thesis on regional food production.

She graduated in 2004 determined to turn Providence into its own version of Tuscany, albeit a bit grittier.

Louis Escobar, one of 23 dairy farmers in the state, said Brown's recent decision to serve Rhody Fresh milk in its dining hall was a huge boost for his fledgling cooperative.

"As a Rhode Island dairy farmer, I'm an endangered species," said Escobar, president of the Rhody Fresh co-op. "It's been like a shot of antibiotics for a sick animal."

While Hill hasn't won over all of Brown's student body--the line for pizzas and hamburgers remains robust--some students are thrilled by Hill's efforts, so much so that they happily disrobed for the calendar.

"It was a bit intimidating because I haven't been naked in front of lots of people," said Soyun Kim, a 31-year-old medical student whose thighs are featured in March, balancing a portobello mushroom. "Putting [local food] in people's consciousness was my goal in participating, and I think it did that."

Besides, Kim said, "It was a distraction from studying physiology."