Campus Sustainability Day: Today

Happy Campus Sustainability Day!  To celebrate, UVa Dining is featuring dishes in its dining halls that can be deemed a "Green Menu Item".  At lunch, students enjoyed dishes like eggplant parmesan (Newcomb), corn chowder soup (O'Hill), and chicken caesar salad with local Romaine lettuce (Runk).  Green your menu at dinner this evening and continue the celebration!

Corn chowder at O'Hill

O'Hill salad bar - green every day!

UVa Sustainability Dialogue

Thanks to everyone that came out for yesterday's Sustainability Dialogue at the Kaleidoscope Room!  Paxton Marshall, Cheryl Gomez, Andrew Greene, and I all spoke about various facets of sustainability across the university and how we're tackling the UVa directive to reduce CO2 emissions by 25% of 2009 levels by 2025.

It was an informative session, with some lively discussion afterwards.  To learn more about the event and the carbon commitment, take a look at this NBC29 coverage:


Video about UVa Sustainability Dialogue



Reflecting on AASHE 2011

The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, or AASHE, held its annual conference last month at the green (and LEED Gold certified) David L. Lawrence Convention Center in downtown Pittsburgh.  This year’s theme was “Creating Sustainable Campuses and Communities”, and, appropriately, many of the workshops centered around place-based education and ways for campuses and their surrounding communities to successfully collaborate.

Scenic Pittsburgh view from the convention center balcony

UVa was well represented at the conference, with six staff members, two faculty members, and five students attending (and most of us carpooling!), and a number of us presenting posters or giving presentations. I gave a presentation entitled “Fostering a Local Food Procurement System: UVa Dining’s Relationship with the Local Food Hub”, which went well and seemed to elicit a significant amount of interest from attendees. In fact, that appeared to be the case with all food-related presentations and dialogues, and reinforces what is obviously a growing trend among college and university campuses: institutions want to play a role in ensuring food security and food sustainability.

Here is a sampling of food projects that various schools and organizations shared at the conference:

• University of Florida is eradicating 100% of its Styrofoam on campus, including at national brand retail locations like Chik-fil-A
• Arizona State University has established a thriving, 27-vendor farmers market on its campus every other Tuesday throughout the academic year
• Yale is reinventing its salad bar by removing processed meats and replacing with fresh produce; also by removing all processed salad dressings and replacing with high-end olive oils and house-made dressings
• The EPA has just launched its Food Waste Recovery program, to encourage schools to reduce food waste along all tiers of the food waste recovery hierarchy
• Randolph College is designing an edible urban landscape for the green spaces on its campus
• The Marine Stewardship Council provides a 3rd party sustainability certification to wild stocks of fish around the world, and in turn colleges and universities can buy this MSC-certified fish as a way of increasing their percentage of sustainable food purchases
• Emory created a part-time Farmer Liaison position to seek out partnerships with Georgia farmers between 2007 and 2009, and has also published an Eating Sustainably booklet on its website with such sub-topics as “Health Benefits & Sustainable Eating” and “Sustainable Food and the Georgia Economy”
• Students at the University of Western Michigan are in the process of launching a student-run cooperate café on campus, called The Campus Beet

All of these discrete projects illustrate the growing momentum on campuses around the country to be part of the shift in the way that our food is grown, processed, distributed, and consumed. The variety of presentations given is particularly indicative of the great depth and breadth of this food movement: people are approaching the journey towards food and agriculture sustainability from public health, social justice, climate change, and even cultural and heritage perspectives. Food is, of course, deeply personal, and means something to everyone. It makes sense, then, that due to everyone’s vested interest in “eating as an agricultural act”, colleges and universities would rise up to pioneer sustainability innovations in this sector.

Dr. Sandra Steingraber, one of the conference’s keynote speakers, eloquently summed up higher education’s responsibilities where sustainability was concerned, when she told the crowd that we couldn’t let people be lulled into a sense of complacency by dutifully taking out their recycling, or other relatively superficial activities. Instead, it is time for institutions – and the people working, teaching, or being educated at them – to step up and do something heroic.

How can Virginia institutions step up?

Fair Trade Month: October

Happy Fair Trade Month!  Dining celebrated last Wednesday with a Fair Trade coffee and chocolate sampling event right outside of Crossroads, and we had a great time sharing these little bites with passersby along with a bit of education about Fair Trade certification and what it means in regards to sustainability.

Info tabling for Fair Trade Month

A few Fair Trade facts:

• Economics -- Fair Trade certified businesses work cooperatively together in order to cut out the middleman and receive a living wage for their products.  This ensures a sustainable business model.
• Envionment -- The Fair Trade certification requires agricultural items to be grown according to specific environmental standards that prevent deforestation and erosion, and use of toxins that can harm the water supply, among other criteria.  This ensures a sustainable growing environment.
• Equity -- Some revenues earned through Fair Trade certification are put towards improving infrastructure, like building schools, health clinics, or libraries.  Children and women in particular are empowered through these resulting opportunities.  This ensures a sustainable community.

Dining is proud to carry a number of Fair Trade certified products in our retail locations - and not just during the month of October! 

Fair Trade label

These are the Fair Trade certified products that Crossroads carries on any given day:

• Green & Black's organic chocolate bars (Almond, Dark, White, Maya Gold, Hazelnut & Currant)
• Ben & Jerry's ice cream (Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, and Half-Baked)
• Choice organic tea (Chamomile, Classic Black, and Classic Green)
• Honest Tea (Black Forest Berry, Green Dragon Tea, Just Green Tea, Peach Oo-La-Long, Pearfect White Tea, Pomegranate Red Tea with Goji Berry)
• Coffee 

Handing out samples

Sydney and Sedia spread the word about Fair Trade Month

Fair Trade USA has also just introduced a new "Fair Trade Finder" App that allows you to easily find Fair Trade items wherever you are -- and needs people like you to help populate the database.  Check out the Fair Trade website for more information.

Thanks for stopping by last week, and check out the Fair Trade products throughout the rest of the month and beyond!  Remember: every purchase matters.

Local Food Hub Warehouse Tour

Last week, a few of the UVa Dining chefs and I trekked out to the Local Food Hub warehouse in Ivy (a few miles west of Charlottesville and Grounds) for a tour of the space and to give the chefs an opportunity to see the Food Hub operation for themselves.  Alan Moore, Head of Sales, led the tour and answered questions about partner producers, seasonal availability, and other logistics.  Lisa Reeder, Farm Services staff member, set up a lovely apple and pear sampling spread for us to try out, and even sent us home with some goodie bags!

Dining is grateful to the Local Food Hub for the warm reception and for taking the time to show us around.  Every dollar spent with the Local Food Hub is a dollar keeping Virginia agriculture a viable economic sector.

Alan and the chefs checking out a box of produce

 

The Local Food Hub warehouse



Locally Grown



Local Food Hub branding

Misty Morven

A sizeable group of students braved the gloomy weather this past Friday morning to venture out to Morven Farm for the Dining sponsored garden tour.  Though we all experienced our fair share of mud and rain, we had a great time -- special thanks to Marie, Michelle and Rowan for showing us around!  The overcast skies made the garden pop with color and accentuate the lush greenery in production, so that it actually looked quite lovely.  I think the garden may have even gotten a few more potential volunteers... :)

Introductions

Everyone learned a lot about the history - both recent and less so (Kluge versus Jefferson) - of the property, and how the garden had gotten its start in its current inception last spring.  We made our way throughout the garden quadrants, taking a look at the corn, the compost pile, the chickens, the okra, the row cover, and the flowers scattered around the growing space to attract pollinators and good insects.  It was an enlightening journey, particularly in our observations of the sheer quantity of produce we saw growing in just a single acre plot.  It takes a lot of manpower to keep that one acre producing so abundantly, but the education and bucolic setting that goes hand in hand with the effort makes the labor more than worth it.


Observing through the umbrellas



Checking out the okra flowers

 

Rowan explains the "crow disco" set-up



Marie and Michelle show off their hand-built toolshed

The enthusiastic group

For more details about the tour and the garden, check out the news coverage from NBC29!

Local Food Hub Farm Stand Recap

Yesterday's Local Food Hub pop-up farm stand was a success!  The morning dawned rainy and generally grey, but we went ahead and set up under our awnings and were rewarded with sunshine and climbing temperatures by midday.  Emily Manley and Lisa Reeder both came on behalf of the Local Food Hub, and brought with them several bushels of apples and pears for selling and tasting. 

Readying some apples for sampling

Despite the questionable weather, students and staff alike came by to sample and buy fruit, and to learn more about Dining's general sustainability programming.  It was great to see so much interest from so many new faces.  NBC29 even stopped by to do a quick story about the stand:

Lisa Reeder describes the differences between the apple varieties available at the stand

Supporting our local farmers

The runaway hit of the day (truly delicious - and I don't even usually like pears!)

Sampling remnants

Apple season is in full swing

The Local Food Hub motto

All in all, a fun and tasty event.  Don't forget to head to O'Hill tonight for dinner or Newcomb tomorrow for lunch if you liked what you had yesterday: local apples are being featured at their autumn apple bars.  And keep your eyes peeled for the "Local & Seasonal" bull's eye signage in all of the dining rooms; this identifies produce coming from the Local Food Hub and other local sources.