On Sept. 29, as many of you may already know, was the Eat Local Challenge at TDR during lunch. All of the food served came from a 150-mile radius of AU. I hope you all enjoyed the amazing smells and flavors. It was truly delicious, more nutritious, and TDR was more vibrant that day.
In Omnivores Dilemma, Michael Pollan takes Wendell Berry’s quote, “eating is an agricultural act,” a step further to say that “[eating] is also an ecological and political act.” As a community of passionate learners, we have the responsibility to be questioning where our food comes from and what we are putting into our bodies. We cannot afford to be complacent and eat what ever we please. We must escape this mindset and begin to understand that our selection of foods not only shapes our health, but affects the ecology of the planet. Best said by Wendell Berry, “We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us.” Eating locally solves an array of problems that have exacerbated our current situation (desertification due to commodity crops, rising CO2 levels to name a few).
By building tight relationships with nearby farmers we are making a closer connection with our local ecology. A farmer’s use of fertilizers, pesticides, hormones and antibiotics; his treatment of workers, how he plants and many other practices will be visible to customers. It will raise questions like: “Do I really want to be buying something that comes from destructive practices that directly affect the water my family drinks or the well-being of employees, my neighbors? The customers’ purchasing power can push the farmer to become more accountable. The distance from our sources of food allows us to be ignorant to where it’s coming from and what its effects are on the local community.
Food grown locally bypasses the large amounts of greenhouse gases due to flying/trucking food long distances. It doesn’t need to be preserved through refrigeration, chemical preservatives or the wrapping up of products in endless amounts of plastic for the transportation process.
While having local food in TDR for one day is great and we should applaud Bon Appétit efforts towards a more sustainable menu, we must be eating locally everyday. We must push Bon Appétit to be transparent about where the food in TDR comes from. Although they neatly explain the different ways producing the food, (for example for beef they list 5 categories: industrial farming, Antibiotics, Natural, Organic, U.S Grass fed) they do not include the sources of the food they purchase. Transparency and information is core because we must know what the effects of our actions are so we can take a more responsible role. We should know where Bon Appétit is purchasing their produce.
We must seriously engage in efforts to build closer relationships with local farmers and efforts to be growing our food on campus. We must also question why we have chains such as McDonalds and Subway on campus and why we are selling such unhealthy products as Coca-Cola and others. These big companies support unsustainable practices and are much harder to make accountable for their actions. We must know the paths our foods take to get to us and what their actual costs are. We must question why food that is grown locally with less of an impact to the planet costs more than food that travels far distances, has a large input of fossil fuels and destroys the earth. Paul Hawken puts what we are doing to the earth simply: “At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product.”
With AU’s large community, it is a mystery why we aren’t supporting a larger community garden, which could serve both as learning hub for growing our own food (a cost beneficial practice, an ecologically friendly one, and one that we all must engage in, in a future of peak oil and a tipping point of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere), and a way to stop wasting money on things we can do and should be doing ourselves. The fact that we aren’t composting yet on campus shows that we have a long way to go. But we must remain hopeful, roll up our sleeves and act now.
Joseph Amsili of EcoSense
2013 SIS/CAS
