350 Milkshakes from Happy Cows; Increasing Food Sustainability Awareness

I was supposed to be meeting a girl who looked like a horse. I scanned the crowds of eating and laughing students, but all of them looked more or less human. This was so confusing.

Kira Gilman, the sustainability intern for Bard's food service company, Chartwells, and I had arranged to meet for a pleasant chat. Since I had never met her, I had checked out her Facebook picture to recognize her in the crowd. Problem: Kira Gilman's Facebook profile picture was a horse.

“Charlotte! Charlotte!” called a lovely girl with a shy sweet smile and a glittering nose ring. Ah-ha! That must be her. I did the little, “Don't wham into people and drop your plate of food,” dance and made my way to her table.

“There's actually a human on that horse if you look closely,” she clarified, as we dug into our delicious plates of local food.

“All's well that ends well,” I said, and began the barrage of questions. What does her sustainability intern job entail?

“Well, Locavore Week has been great, and I made the signs for that. But mostly I work with Waste Stream Management,” she said. “Look at how much is thrown away at Bard each week. Try to improve composting practices. Things like that.”

“Chartwells composts all its food wastes, right?” I said.

“Well, it composts everything that gets left on the plates,” she explained. “They can't really sort through what goes into the trashcans.”

I was startled. I always feel a little guilty shoving my filthy plates at those hard-working dishwashers, so I had taken to scraping my plate off into the trash before I put it on the dirty dish ledge. I wasn't sure why, it seemed more polite. But apparently I had been taking my food scraps

out of the glorious land of compost and into the ignominious land of landfill.

“People should know this!” I cried.

“Yes, well, maybe we should have better signage, just so people are aware....” Kira agreed.

“What is the biggest source of waste from the cafeteria?” I asked curiously.

Kira echoed what Chas Cerulli, Chartwells director, had said early that week. “Paper cups and dishes. We throw out more of them than we can possibly compost.”

My boyfriend Abhi prefers paper plates, because he finds it disgusting to imagine how many hundreds of previous user's saliva and food leavings have touched his china plate. Every time we go to the cafeteria, I take china and he takes paper. By now I was sick of the Raging Paper Plate Debate. So when he cut into my conversation with Kira, I drooped my head into my hands. Not again......

“Paper plates are better for the environment,” he cried. “Think of the poisonous detergents polluting the waters. Think of all the water wasted washing the plate.”

“But paper plates you have to keep reusing,” Kira argued. “It takes so much more energy to manufacture 365 paper plates. You use much less energy when you use one china plate for a year.”

“That's not true,” said my boyfriend, who is always ready for a good argument. “I have visited a paper plate factory. You use recycled paper pulp and a thin piece of cloth, and wham them into shape with a giant weight. It looks totally sustainable to me.”

“Harvard did a study on china vs. paper,” said Kira, blinking at him. “I forget the exact numbers, but it was something like the energy to make fifty paper plates equals the energy to make one china plate.”

I thought about that for a moment. “So basically, if you were a really clumsy person who was always breaking dishes, it would make sense to get paper plates. But if the china plate can stay intact for more than fifty days, it's the more sustainable option.”

“Exactly,” said Kira. Then she told a story about Manor Cafe, the hot dining spot for North Campus. Chartwells had decided they would rather use paper and plastic dishes for Manor. Some environmentally-minded students had been distressed by this, and volunteered to wash dishes— FOR FREE— so that Manor could afford to go on using china.

The problem was, people were taking dishes home with them and never bringing them back. So Chartwells just had to keep buying and buying new dishes. In the end, they were replacing dishes so often the practice no longer made sense. They were buying new china plates less than fifty days apart (or whatever the Harvard benchmark was.) So the environmentally-minded students gave up in disgust, and now Manor uses paper.

I think what we need is a dish-thief-punishing ninja. You go to Manor, purchase a delicious turkey burger and whoops— there's your ex-girlfriend in the dining room! Carrying your plate of steaming food, you dash for the door, hoping to eat in the ex-girlfriendless comfort of your dorm room. But no sooner have you set foot outside the door than BAM!!! the black-clad dish ninja drops from a tree, and cuts off the Thieving Hand that holds the Stolen Plate. Dripping with blood and clad in glory, the ninja will dart into the cafe to restore the ceramic treasure to its rightful guardians.

Never mind. I think this policy might infringe on the restrictions of the Health Code.

“In India, we use banana leaves for plates,” my boyfriend piped up, breaking me out of my ninja reverie.

“Really?”

“On festivals and special occasions, especially,” he said, looking cheerful. “Its the ultimate in sustainability!”

“Too bad we can't do that over here,” said Kira. I imagined a giant banana tree growing in the center of Kline for people to pluck plates from, and smiled.

“To be frank with you, I was expecting something a little more drastic for Locavore Week,” I told Kira. “We still have bananas, for instance. And coffee.”

“Yes, well they're putting in local products wherever they can, but I guess they're not allowed to stop having certain things.”

“Just out of curiosity, how do you think people would react if we..... TOOK AWAY THEIR COFFEE?” I said. Maybe I have a sadistic streak in my sense of humor, but the idea of people going up to the coffee dispenser only to find it empty, was funny to me.

“Well....” Kira asked. “I think there would probably be a backlash. Like the time we had ONE MEATLESS LUNCH, there was a huge backlash. The comment board of Kline was covered with index cards written by angry angry people.”

“This was just for one meatless meal?” I said.

“Yes, I know!” said Kira, waving her hands. “We weren't even asking them to go without meat for a whole day!!!”

“I talked with the director of Chartwells the other day,” I told Kira. “I asked him whether he would be saving or losing money with Locavore week. He'll be losing money, and its mainly due to the cost of getting the free-range local meat.”

Now I have to stop typing, take a few deep breaths, and get a grip on myself. Or this blog will degenerate into a long rant on the evils of factory farming.

“That's a lovely mug you have there,” I told Kira. A tall blue thermos flask emblazoned with the 350 logo was proudly positioned on the table before her.

“We're planning to give them away to people who pledge never to use paper cups again,” Kira beamed. Keep an eye out for these attractive 350 flasks, people. No more burning your hands because the coffee is too hot and the paper cup is too thin.

“Where are you ambitious to take the sustainability initiative in the future?” I asked Kira.

“I'd love to see Bard be an example for other schools,” Kira said.

Chas Cerulli, the Chartwells manager I interviewed for this blog, thinks the same thing. When I dropped by his office, I found an energetic young executive who moved from swivel chair to swivel chair fighting with computers who hated him. Once the computers had been properly vanquished he came over to talk to me.

I found out that Locavore week is a company-wide initiative taking place in all the many campuses and locations where Chartwells caters. Bard, however is taking it a bit further than the other campuses. Local foods and sustainability has always been a personal interest of Mr. Cerulli. It was he who decided to use the Hudson Valley Fresh milk, whose wondrous qualities have been catalogued in a previous blog entry. He's also started cage-free egg initiatives and tries to buy local foods whenever he can, Locavore week or no. It all began with purchases of local apples from the lovely orchards around here, then snowballed from there.

He mainly purchases from the Hudson Valley Food Co-op, which buys food from an association of diverse small farmers, and sells it in quantities large enough to interest the major buyers. Ordinarily, food purchased from Hudson Valley Co-Op would travel into Manhattan to undergo quality inspection, before returning to Bard (not far from where it started.) Mr. Cerulli arranged to have the food inspected internally in Chartwells and save our lettuce and carrots the 200-mile round trip. “It just makes so much more sense this way,” Mr. Cerulli said. If only more managers would follow Mr. Cerulli's example and look for ways to combine efficiency with sustainability.

“What was the most challenging thing about arranging locavore week?” I asked Mr. Cerulli.

“Creating menus and figuring out recipes based on what we could get locally,” Mr. Cerulli replied. A certain investment of creativity was required. “Its easier for those bigger schools, which have farms that grow exclusively for them,” Mr. Cerulli explained. But small school or not, Bard's performance has been impressive. The menus during Locavore week have been varied and rich.

In the future, Mr. Cerulli hopes to see Bard embrace even better composting practices, cut down on paper waste, and explore sustainable meat and fish. Even though the free-range local meat is more expensive, Mr. Cerulli would, “love to do more with meat,” and he is intrigued with the possibilities presented by the Monteray Bay Aquarium, a sustainable fish-farming operation.

Lately all of us have been seing tiny plaques next to our foods mentioning the number of miles the food has traveled. As people eat their meals, they are forced to think about where the food came from. Signs all over the cafeteria describe various local farms which sourced the foods.

So far the crowning success of Locavore week has been the local cheeses. Long lines of people formed before the cheese counter, where they waited to receive little slices of gourmet cheese on crunchy crackers. The cheese was created only sixty miles away.

My personal favorite, however, has been the little milkshakes made with Hudson Valley Fresh milk. A dairy farmer in a blue uniform stood by the counter and proudly informed students that, "The milkshakes taste so good because they come from my cows.”

You'd love to see Bard be an example for other schools, Kira? Well, I think we already are. I mean we still have a long way to go (getting funding for an environmentally-friendly-behavior- enforcing ninja would be nice for instance.) But what other schools get dairy farmers telling kids in the cafeteria, “Those milkshakes come from my cows?”

Hooray for Bard!

Challenge: find a beautiful thermos and avoid using 350 paper cups before Christmas.