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Olin Rice 249
1600 Grand Avenue
St. Paul, MN 55105
651-696-6274
Comments & questions to:
esson@macalester.edu
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A Thousand Busy Hungry Mouths to Feed –
Where Does Agricultural Sustainability Fit In?
Environmental Audit of the Macalester College Food Service
By M. Jessica Knoll
May 2002
Introduction
The gleaming new facilities of Café Mac have put food in the bellies of students, parents, faculty, and staff at Macalester College for a year and a half now. The improved quality of the food versus that of the old cafeteria, Kagin, is a fact almost universally agreed upon by those who pile fancy dishes high with all-you-can-eat food from Café Mac’s six food stations. But how have things improved environmentally? The annual environmental audit, performed by senior Environmental Studies (ES) majors, seeks to keep tabs on Café Mac’s purchasing, waste disposal, and other issues related to ecological and social sustainability in food production and distribution. ES students in the class of 2001 noted that Café Mac, run by the contracted national food service Bon Appetite, has made significant improvements over Kagin in terms of environmental accountability. New kitchen design and a menu based around to-order service cuts food waste drastically; a waste-compacting machine called the Pulper is considered more environmentally sound than the old Kagin system of paying a pig feedlot employee to pick up food scraps; and Peace Coffee now appears on the Grille menu. However, certain issues of concern still remain. For instance, Bon Appetite buys very little organic or locally-grown food, Peace Coffee is poorly advertised, and food waste could ideally be retrieved by a composting service. These issues and others were brought before Bon Appetite staff last year by the ES seniors and last semester by students belonging to MPIRG, and Minnesota Public Interest Research Group. My goals in interviewing Gary Lensing of Bon Appetite this semester were to examine where the company stands on the issues at the present, note any progress made, and offer more suggestions to improve environmental accountability in campus food service.
Suppliers – Who Grew That Grapefruit, Anyway?
Bon Appetite remains under its usual contract with Alliant food distributors. Gary Lensing explained that he is happy with Alliant because they offer a very good price and allow Bon Appetite to remain competitive, passing on the good prices to the college and the students. Eighty to ninety percent of the products in Café Mac are purchased from Alliant. Since Alliant will not even release price lists, let alone lists of suppliers, pinpointing the source of any food product supplied by the company is incredibly difficult. Alliant was recently purchased by US Foods Corporation, and it is doubtful that this absorption into an even larger corporate structure will help students in wading through bureaucracy to find out where their food was grown. To be more socially and environmentally responsible, a student eating a grapefruit in Café Mac might want to know, for instance, who grew the grapefruit, how much that farmer was paid, what chemicals were sprayed on it, and how far it traveled to reach Grand and Snelling. Bon Appetite itself has not experienced any noticeable changes since the corporate buyout of Alliant.
A lesser portion of Bon Appetite’s purchases is from smaller companies. To make the Asian station as authentic as possible, Asian imports are purchased from Asian Foods, which also supplies many Twin Cities Asian grocery stores and restaurants. Westland Meat Company, located in south Saint Paul, is a backup supplier for meat. Some paper goods (including recycled napkins) are purchased from Trio. Three vendors supply Bon Appetite’s coffee: Peace Coffee (a locally-run company that imports organic, shade-grown, fair trade coffee), Dunn Brothers (a locally-owned chain), and Superior McGarvey. Bix Produce supplies some seasonal fruit and vegetables. All of the fish served in Café Mac is bought from American Fish, a local, family-owned and -operated specialty fish company. American Fish also supplies some turkey and all chicken breasts. Bon Appetite recently began purchasing only the types of fish approved by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch Program (see Appendix 1). The Monterey Bay recommendations approve a fish species, and sometimes a specific catch location, “based on what it does to the environment,” Lensing explained. “So as a company, we have made a commitment to…use this as a guideline when we purchase fish.”
Macalester’s commitment to purchasing only more sustainably harvested fish is certainly a step in the right direction. This ethic could also conceivably be carried over to purchase only sustainably produced meat and other animal products. However, upholding this stricter ethic would be very difficult within the framework of the current Alliant contract. The relative sustainability of fishing practices is often more easy to empirically quantify, as compared to practices in meat, dairy, and egg production. Bon Appetite also has more flexibility in fish purchases because it deals with a small local fish company.
The Always-Messy Problem of Food Waste
Disposal of the many pounds of organic waste generated each day at Macalester has long been a problem. In Kagin, Bon Appetite ended up paying a pig farmer to haul away food scraps. This created a slew of hygiene problems – rodents, flies, and a serious stench. Often the pig farmer would drive on by when the driveway was blocked by a delivery truck, leaving Kagin without clean scrap buckets to use inside the next day. Lensing expressed fear that hiring a commercial composting service would simply echo the problems with the pig farmer at Kagin. “I try to envision doing [a pick up system] over here – it would be just chaos!” Lensing stated. “Composting is not a common, normal operating procedure.” The new Café Mac facilities were not built with storage space for food scraps, whether for hog farms or compost. Hiring a small firm for food waste pick up would also be particularly difficult at Café Mac, since the loading docks are not at ground level and lift stations are needed. Delivery and pick up were not easy at Kagin either, Lensing explained, “it was just a different set of problems.” The fact that delivery trucks must negotiate with the very busy intersection of Grand and Snelling, as well as the tight urban space that limits storage, make it difficult to envision a good system for composting Café Mac’s leftovers.
Indeed, Lensing regrets that “there is no perfect system” for waste disposal. Garbage disposals are disagreeable environmentally, and few other options exist for an urban building the size of the Campus Center. The Pulper, a food waste compression machine, was installed in the move to Café Mac. Lensing remains happy with the machine, and proudly showed it to a group of Bon Appetite representatives from colleges on the East coast the day I met with him. The Pulper runs water through a trough containing all food waste and paper napkins, churns the mixture, and then squeezes out most of the water to create a compacted mass, which is thrown out with the normal trash. This is seen by the college to be a positive step environmentally, but it still means that a huge amount of food waste is going into landfills, and the inclusion of non-compostable items in the mixture make the disposed mass more difficult to biodegrade.
With options for food waste disposal seriously limited, a more important goal is to reduce the amount of waste produced in the first place. Since nearly all food waste is from student’s plates, and not from Café Mac’s preparation, a “Clean Plate” campaign may be in order to reduce how much food students load onto their plates. Café Mac workers apparently have been instructed to give students small portions, because students can always return to the counter for more. A simple several-day campaign of ES students handing out “Clean Plate Club” stickers or prizes at the tray return line would be a humorous way to raise awareness of the origin of food waste at Macalester.
Food recovery programs, such as Second Harvest, are occasionally used by Bon Appetite. Café Mac donates the largest amount of food at the beginning of winter break, getting rid of everything it cannot freeze. Lensing said “it’s a whole other story” when it comes to donating food left over at the end of meals on a regular basis. Shelters are “very picky” about the condition of the food: it must be in a certain kind of container, and complex regulations get in the way. Bon Appetite has looked into this type of donation often, but Lensing regrets, “I don’t think as a society we’ve gotten that far and that organized yet.”
What about the bounty of real fruits and vegetables fanning out around the food platters? Students have inquired about the display food several times on Café Mac comment cards. No need to worry – all the “décor food” is refrigerated after the evening meal, washed, and recycled back into the menu.
The Invisibility of Peace Coffee
Organic, shade grown, fair trade Peace Coffee was added to the menu at the Grille after several years of lobbying by the student body. However, as noted in the 2001 audit, Peace Coffee is poorly advertised. This has not changed this year, and in the absence of signs, Lensing does not believe students show a preference for Peace Coffee. He is not opposed to signage, however, and said he would talk to the Grille manager about the issue. The Grille put up table tents last year with Peace Coffee information, but “they just kind of disappeared.” Lensing does think he sells a lot of Peace Coffee, and has even become a Peace Coffee drinker himself. “They have a very good product,” he states. “I think it’s gotten better, actually – either that or my palate has changed.” Future ES students could perhaps make life-size cardboard cutouts of Lensing, other Bon Appetite workers, or favorite professors advertising the socially- and environmentally-conscious choice of Peace Coffee.
Peace Coffee only fills a couple of pots at the Grille; the rest of the coffee served is Dunn Brothers. In Café Mac itself, only Superior McGarvey coffee is served. McGarvey coffee is much more practical than Peace Coffee when serving the large quantities of coffee doled out to puffy-eyed students in the cafeteria. Peace Coffee beans are more expensive, but the real limiting factor is that Peace Coffee cannot supply the equipment or service that Superior McGarvey Corporation can. The fifteen or so airports inside Café Mac each cost $65, and need to be replaced fairly often. McGarvey also supplies the coffee urns used in catering. If Peace Coffee was used universally at Macalester, the college would have to pay for equipment and service. The college had to chip in to bring Peace Coffee to just two pots in the Grille, and it will take serious lobbying and/or fundraising to expand Peace Coffee service in Café Mac.
The Big Banana Issue
Cynic that I am, I don’t see Café Mac switching to all organic produce any time soon. A more feasible goal might be to focus on one product and introduce it gradually, as was the case with coffee. Along with many other Macalester students, I have a personal interest in organic banana production. I explained to the very interested Gary Lensing what I saw when I was abroad in Australia: conventional banana plantations that destroy rainforest, pollute groundwater with chemicals, dump chemical fertilizers into ecologically sensitive areas, and bring in insect and disease problems common to monoculture. Other students that study in Latin America have noted negative political and social consequences of conventional banana farming as well; small farmers are often displaced from traditional lands and forced into an unsustainable, chemical-dependent, export-driven system. Lensing was eager to learn more about organic bananas and to research price lists available through his suppliers. He warned that purchasers always pay more for organic, since there is more labor involved in production, “which is okay, as long as people [read: not Café Mac] will pay for it.”
The current banana system at Café Mac is a $10,000 a year operation. Deliveries come three times per week, and Café Mac sometimes still runs out. According to Lensing, students apparently refuse to eat bananas with a “speck” of brown. Thus, about a third of bananas arrive as “readies”, that is, already gassed with ethylene so that they are perfectly yellow. The rest are “turners,” slightly green and about to turn yellow within a day or two. Obviously, bananas are much more sensitive than other fruits. Uneaten, overripe bananas are recycled through the bakery as much as possible, and become bread and muffins. Some brown bananas unfortunately always make it into the trash.
After Lensing did research, he found that organic bananas from his suppliers would cost at least twice as much as conventionally grown bananas. Organic bananas are therefore not an option for Café Mac unless the extra $10,000+ comes from the school or another source. Considering the substantial amount of student effort it took to get the school to spend a couple hundred dollars on airports for Peace Coffee, this money will not come easily. If consciousness is raised among alumni, perhaps a new alumni environmental committee could be formed around the banana issue. Alumni could give specifically to the organic banana fund each year. I feel it would be beneficial for future ES students to rally around the banana issue, just as organic coffee has been a hot topic and a rallying point.
Veggie versus Meat
Since many students are vegetarian or vegan for environmental reasons, I asked Lensing about his experience purchasing veggie food for Café Mac. I was particularly interested in whether serving veggie meals -- the number of which seems to have increased greatly since the days of Kagin -- saves any money. Lensing didn’t know if any money is really saved with the production of veggie meals; he only knows what it costs per average meal served. He thought it was a misconception that veggie food is cheaper. He gave the example of a carnivorous student eating a four ounce chicken breast, which costs him 75 cents. A vegan student could fill a small bowl with cantaloupe and cost him the same amount. A big veggie expense comes from soy and rice milk. Bon Appetite pays $2.50 for a one liter box of non-dairy milk, whereas bulk cow milk comes in five-gallon bags for only $2 a gallon. Tofu, seitan, and other “meat alternatives” are pricey too.
The number of options for veggie students has increased in the move to Café Mac, and a particular station (most notably the Curry Bar) may be entirely meat-free some days. Meat-eaters have complained about the lack of meat options only during preseason, when the menu is scaled down for 150 athletes. Bon Appetite received more complaints from meat-eaters in Kagin, owing to the greater number of choices overall in Café Mac. Lensing listed the options: the North station, which serves American “comfort food”, always has a meat entrée. On the East side, the Mediterranean station serves a meat pizza about half the time, the pasta entrée contains meat about every third day, and the Asian station almost always has a meat dish. The South burrito line always serves meat, and the Curry Bar has a meat item 70% of the time. And of course, the Grille always serves hamburgers and other meat. Vegetarian and vegan options are available nearly all the time at each of the stations, with the exception of the North station, which never has veggie entrées. Though some students may wish to see less meat served, Café Mac does make a good effort to have options available for everyone.
Conclusion
Café Mac is now providing more on-campus meals than ever before. Participation, or the percentage of meals eaten from the student meal plan, has risen 10% since the Kagin days. But Macalester is still a small school, and with enough student interest and administrative or outside support, all these meals could be produced in a more environmentally sound manner.
Where does the burden lie? The board cost rose “significantly” in the move to Café Mac to cover increased labor costs, and 75% of room and board costs goes to board. Therefore, we cannot really expect students to foot the bill for more expensive organic food. However, as noted earlier, most food waste comes from students’ plates. Raising campus awareness around this issue seems relatively simple. Similarly, some basic Peace Coffee advertising could change student purchasing behaviors at the Grille. Students could also campaign for Bon Appetite to improve its purchasing at key times, most notably in the autumn and late spring when locally produced food is available. In the longer term, Macalester should encourage alumni and donor funding for specific environmental projects, including food (coffee! bananas!).
Macalester obviously wishes to have an impressive cafeteria, judging from the amount of donor money funneled into the beautiful new facility. The college certainly spent a lot of money on hip, colorful dishes; it would really be impressive if it decided to set an example of a more environmental food service by allocating school funds to improve Café Mac ecologically. It is interesting to note that few specific environmental design elements were incorporated into the new cafeteria when the college was provided with opportune time to prioritize environmentalism into its campus architecture. This represents a larger institutional problem of an overall lack of environmental concern at Macalester. Hopefully, small campaigns run by ES students to raise campus environmental awareness will drive positive change in Macalester’s food service.
Appendix 1
 
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