The Ethical Food Movement on Campus: Is it Workable?
Yesterday Karen Resta Bateman posted a long comment that dealt with the enthusiastic efforts of certain colleges to embrace ethical dining.
Now Karen is no slouch when it comes to catering for organizations. She rose through the ranks to become executive chef at Goldman Sachs. So her comments are worth listening to. Leaving aside the specifics of the situation at Yale, she has worries about how to train staff to prepare this food, how to ensure regular deliveries of local and organic, and how to keep tabs on the accounting.
I’m posting them in full here.
“The ethical food movement on campus: The Corby Kummer article (which can be found online here offers a very nice scenario of how it did work, at that point in time (is it still in existence in the same form? I really wonder!) at one college within Yale University.
It’s a really heart-warming tale of how the sad gloomy tastes of the usual cafeteria food were overcome by fresh vital delicious locally farmed foods – after the warriors of Good Taste and Finesse managed to wrest free the old ways of Dependence Upon the Greedy Corporation from those who obviously did not know any better.
To me these stories always have the hint of an underlying farce. I can not read them ’straight up’, having seen too often in real life that there is no black and white but rather a lot of other colors that get really mixed up as power shifts hands and new things happen that are supposed to be a nice and clean but that end up being every bit as messy and distasteful as the old things. Salvation really does not lay in a home-farmed carrot.
It was a wonderful story though, the Kummer tale of the success of the ethical food movement on campus that year, and how really fantastic it would be if all campuses could eat that way – if all people could eat that way! There were several points within this story of momentary success that lingered in my mind afterwards as being worthy of thought.
This happened at Yale. Not a place lacking resources in the first place. In terms of measuring where this happened as opposed to the majority of other campuses there is a huge difference. It’s like comparing a legitimate Renoir on the wall to a mass-printed shiny paper poster of the same scene. Most campuses are not Yale and will never be. They lack the resources, the power, the $$$, and perhaps even the brainpower and determination. Certainly this would be even more true of the average Community College – those schools which are like the Wal-Marts of higher education. After all, everyone needs a college degree of some sort to get any sort of decent job today, and not everyone can afford it.
That season at Yale Kummer tells of: How did the ethical food program in that one small college on that large university campus (elitism within elitism here?)(not to argue against elitism but it is good to recognize it where it is for what it is) manage to get started?
Well! It started that year because Alice Water’s daughter was attending Yale as a freshman that year. And Alice just happened to somehow meet the president of Yale, whose daughter knew Alice Waters daughter as they both had just had happened to attend some other private school where ethical farming was taught to the gentry whose incomes allowed them to send their children along this path of private school-to-Yale-as-we-get-our-hands-a-little-dirty inbetween Latin classes.
Goodness! I am having a fantasy that instead of the now-discarded Debutante Balls the new thing will be to have an Agricultural Fair where one can ‘come out’ and show how big they managed to grow their pumpkins with feeding the earth only dried leaves from Sak’s new gardening department mixed with sustainable caviar from Iceland (as we must do our parts to save them too).
So you have Yale. Alice Waters. The President of Yale. Their two children entering college whom of course as parents they want to feed as well as humanly possible. Then! Voila. Waters finds an ‘anonymous’ donor to fund the whole thing.
Personally I wonder about the anonymous part. If I were Waters or Yale President I’d put up the money myself and just say it was anonymous.
Yale wins with a gold star added to it’s stack of gold stars. Waters wins with a gold star added to hers. Great public relations and marketing job done all around. The college kids win, as long as the money holds out or till the program can be self-supporting or if not then some other anonymous donor can be found to support it or until an increase in tuition is made to cover the operational costs.
This is simply not what happens at most colleges.
To move to a different area of looking at this: It was noted in the article that it was difficult to re-train the cooking staff, who were accustomed to mostly opening jars and cans and packets. Production cooking. Production cooking must be consistent in most places. You’ve got to have enough of one kind of thing to be able to serve one consistent thing to lots and lots of people. Otherwise people can actually get angry. They want the food they had yesterday. They do not really (for the most part) want to be told that it is not available due to the (locally sourced) crop not yielding the expected amount. Apart from that even, they want pizza and they want it with tomatoes. How far does one stretch the rule, and who decides? Messy, time consuming and cumbersome. Universities in particular are cumbersome machines of committees that seem unable to decide anything but which usually take the safest route possible that will offend the least amount of people. I’d like to put a university committee into a town meeting somewhere and ask them to decide a simple question then tell them not to leave the room till it was decided. My guess would be that they would have to live in that room for the rest of their lives – or at least till somebody could not stand living one more moment without a Pizza Hut pizza a Coke and a Cheesecake Factory cheesecake. That might make one or more of them cave in enough to fudge their vote. A dish of local parsnips tossed with whole wheat pasta – I don’t know. I don’t think it would do it for the majority of them. They would live there forever.
So let’s say the money has been found. The administration has okay’d the program. Actually this has happened at a number of campuses – style does matter in terms of luring college students along with their parent’s dollars.
Let’s say that the cooks have been re-trained and are happy enough about it. Now there’s the facilities and ethics question: If this is going to be done for one group it must be done for all. It must be made fair. In order to have that happen, new facilities with kitchens that are actually designed for cooking, not package-opening – must be built. Ah. Where will the money come from? Why for goodness sake it looks like all that money is tied up in doing something for the football team! Oh well.
Am I ranting? Yes. Am I against ethical food on campus? No. It can happen.
I’ve heard stories of how some of these programs have run from the inside by some of those who have participated on a management level. Some of the things that are unlikely to be discussed in public are the details of how one manages when the local farmer says ‘oops the kale died’ and the promise to the diners who are paying for local kale through the nose has been ‘local kale’ capitalized, romanticized, and almost religion-icized. How does a manager of a facility get local kale when there is none to be had? Substitute another local ingredient? Not always possible in production cooking. Remember, people want consistency in what they eat and many are not all that flexible. The amount of emotional meltdowns I’ve seen in my time when the exact thing a person at the table wanted was not available to them is truly amazing. Managers want to avoid this because it reflects on them and on their job capabilities. What will they do? They will fudge.
The local kale will become not local kale. Surprise surprise.
Yes, I’ve heard it from the horse’s mouths.
Some of the campuses are working with the larger vendors who have promised to source locally. Personally, I do not trust that as far as I can throw it, having known the ways of operation of the larger vendors in general but of their salespeople in particular who come to hang out in the chef’s office for as long as they possibly can wasting time trying to be buddy buddy and always trying to send along nice lump sums of money as Christmas gifts. Why would they do that? Oh. Just being friendly I guess. No strings attached? (???)
One other thing happens in the operations of ethically-promised food on campus. The first is that because of the fact that the food is coming in from here there and everywhere as opposed to one vendor with control systems set in place, there are receipts for all kinds of payments floating around on a daily basis. The opportunity for anyone who wants to make a bit of money on the side as a manager is simply sitting there waiting to be taken. And it is taken. And this often is not discovered because nobody on a higher level is going to double-check those receipts against what was received on the log and/or then check that that item was used in an actual menu. The operational workings of a food-service facility within another institution (when the core goals of the umbrella institution are vastly different than producing food) are arcana in general to those overlooking them.
All in all I think one can depend on a thing actually being what it says it is if there are the systems in place to be able to check that it indeed is. There. That is actually science, isn’t it. Proofs and checks. I’m positive that in most of the scenarios played out on campus in terms of ethical food really being what it is touted as being: it isn’t.
Rather Oliver Twist-ish and all. But there you have it.”
If I hadn’t been so concerned with trying to say a zillion things all at the same time I would have checked my grammar and punctuation.
:)
Sigh.
I think realistically meals made with more fresh ingredients can be introduced into institutions through outside vendors who do the shopping, cooking and packaging. It really depends on the set up a school has, resources, the kind of kitchen, staff, and so on.
Entire movements are a bit trickier…
I agree with you, Ji-Young. Core points being financial resources and set up.
Entire movements: Why does everything have to be a ‘movement’ today?
If I had to choose between two things starting with the letter “i” my choice would be ‘individual choice’, not ‘ideology’. There’s simply too high a level of cultishness in any organized ideologic thrust. One might actually say that the ideology of ‘movements’ is not natural nor ‘organic’ but rather the opposite. Any ideology is at its core a heavily organized and industrial thing.
Meh.
Thank you! Rachel, for printing this! It is a breath of fresh air. I have a notion that the people who cry the loudest about this are often people who stop at the local deli, Trader Joe’s or Sainsbury’s or such on their way home for an ethical chicken and couscous ‘heat&serve’ dinner.
This brings me to another item with which I’m having a lot of trouble. I can’t seem to wrap my mind around “ethical food”, a term which I’m seeing more and more in print. I think of ethical as an adverb; a description of an action or a system of actions. One might make an ethical judgment. Or, there might be an unethical system of financial distribution. Bad taste in food in not a moral issue. Food might be handled or sold, etc., in an ethical fashion but then one makes a judgement about the handler or seller, not about the food itself. Why is food that caters to one group’s taste considered morally superior to food designed and produced for other tastes, other circumstances, other monetary considerations?
I don’t want to be rude or too blunt, but my response to your rant is “deal with it”, “get over it” or “move over and find someone more creative and less cynical to take your place”.
It’s happening in a lot of places. There are a lot of burps and bumps along the way. You deal with half wit farmers who can’t balance a check book but produce glorious greens. You deal with a lot of them and they’re not as much fun as your Sysco rep, I’m sure. They waste a lot of your time, even. You’ll need to retrain your vendors, your customers and even your supervisors. It’s hard. George Bush complained about his job being hard. I can think of a few folks willing to take on the burden. Life is hard. It’s not going to be easy. I think it’s better you admit it’s of little importance to you or it’s out of your skill set.
If you want to, you can do it. you’ll have to endure idiot suppliers, customers and supervisors, but it can be done. Local, sustainable, blah blah is fine but we have a lot of people to feed. And I think they deserve real food. But the problem is how to produce and serve it. But let’s put our best heads together and figure out the best way instead of whining about dealing with multiple suppliers.
For what it’s worth, I’ve never heard the term “ethical food” until reading this.
Sorry if my response is too strong. It just strikes me that maybe you’re not the right person for the job.
Please excuse my rant. I think I’m tired and the entry just struck a nerve. Can I just say it’s great that people are taking such an interest in food and if we try really hard, we might come up with some workable solutions. From my point of view, it’s worth the effort.
An excellent point, Kay Curtis. ‘Ethical’ as adverb – and who gets to decide how it functions as adverb.
Several things have been running through my mind during this discussion. The first is that it will be very interesting to see what happens November 4th in California when the voters get a chance to decide on California Proposition 2 .
The other is the thought that in deciding the ethics of any thing, there is never just one set group or set thing to consider. Often there are many groups to consider and what might seem fair treatment to one may not be fair treatment to another.
At certain moments when considering the history of women and the history of those who serve families of higher incomes (who were called servants in the past but who now have names that are not quite so direct) I become slightly angry at the assumption that Slow Food is the answer. The thought flits through my mind like the Little Red Hen: Who will do the work? Well. We know what happened to the Little Red Hen. A wonderful moral tale yet not a particularly jolly one.
Being all Green and Ethical in the set phrase way the media defines (or that certain groups define) may not be quite as green (in the sense of providing growth) and ethical and full of humanity to certain of the human beings involved in some cases, actually.
I’ve recently had a chance to see an example of this that is interesting (for me at least!) to muse upon. There is a preschool in my local neighborhood whose directive-in-general is to be Green (i.e. Ethical and I capitalized that on purpose). This translates into some very good things, naturally – but one of the things that I saw when I visited the school gave me pause for thought.
They do not use disposables/paper goods to feed the children but rather trays and silverware. All very nice. Nice nice. Nice for the environment, nice for the idea of children learning about caring for what one certain approved way of eating and manners involves. But when you follow the trail of the food down to where it must be cleaned up, surprisingly it is not the director of the place who does this cleaning up that makes things green and ‘ethical’.
Instead, rather – it is a worker making minimum wage (where I live that is $6.55 p/hr) who cleans the trays and silverware. And the worker does it without a dishwasher because there is no dishwasher built into the kitchen because the thought never occurred to anyone who wrote the budget for such things that one would be needed. Someone . . . someone other than they . . . would be running the hot water and soap into the three-container bay of sinks, scrubbing and rinsing and finally dunking into the bleach water then air drying etc etc. for the close to one hundred meals served at this place each day. And the worker will do this each day for the same wage, droning on through the mess that someone else made – and I’m pretty sure that the idea of Green and Ethical will not be pleasingly flying through her mind as she does so then probably rushes home after work to do the same for her husband and children. (Or at least when she does rush home to do that rather than probably gleefully going through the drive-through as if it were the best damn thing since sliced bread!)
There is definitely room within the discussion of ‘ethical food’ to find where the real action of ethical behavior finally should best land, I think. There’s more to the thing than a flat surface and some gorgeous very special food.
But you’ve reminded me of one of my favorite television shows that now apparently can be viewed online for free, with the question of the word ‘ethical’ – Ethics in America . Great show. :)
Steve,
If you were referring to my rant in your comment, I think you may have not read my post fully. I am not a chef trying to fit ‘ethical’ food into a foodservice facility. I was a chef at one time of my life (self-taught having left home and school two months into the ninth grade), but now I do other things, having become a VP at an investment bank (but dealing with feeding people – not just money – but yes, how much it costs to feed people and to employ people who do the work to feed people) and gone all evilly corporate and all – then having left that life.
And though it is an election year, I don’t remember putting my name on any ballot for the ‘job’ you mention. Nor have I applied for any job of that sort. Was it listed in the newspaper? Gosh, I must have missed that. But it wouldn’t have been to my taste, anyway.
I’m not in anyone’s way – in terms of ‘ethical food’ hitting any menu anywhere. Bravo to anyone who wants to take the job on. More bravos if they can make it affordable to everyone and not just those with deep pockets. So I guess I don’t have to move over. I merely watch with interest and once in a while with a comment or an action as a consumer of food myself.
I think it’s great that people are taking such an interest in food too. And if someone wants to shape it into a personal meaningful struggle that is simply about food, that’s great.
But to me it is not just about food, when one talks about food. It’s about many other things, each one of those worthy of as deep a care as the food that somehow touches them in some way. Therefore I will keep pulling out the other stuff and putting it on the table till I see ethics in equal quantities being doled out for everyone that has to produce, shop for, cook, or eat the food. Tough nut to crack, I think. But there it sits.
To me, the issue is that certain sorts of food, produced to a higher quality, born of ethics that self-reflect specifically to the process of food production and not further than that out into societal realities (except often as reflections of a culture hungry for aspirational markers of class), are not affordable in more than one way for many groups of people both here and in other countries.
I’m actually surprised that you didn’t comment earlier, as the past has shown me that you will strike and strike hard at certain of my comments.
Ah well. I rant and you rant. It almost sounds like I scream you scream we all scream for ice cream. A good start for a rap song, perhaps.
P.S. The messiness of managing the thing is secondary, but if I remember back to the original post Rachel asked what we thought, so that is what I started talking about.
Initially it seemed natural to think and respond to her question in terms of operational management, for that is where the serious and dirty work of any job lays. It has to be managed and not sheened over or things are either a big joke or (and this happens too often) a lie.
I love the how-to’s. One needs them to back up any rhetoric.
:)
I’m sorry. I just saw the title “The Ethical Food Movement on Campus: Is it Workable?” and then your post, which on the face of things seemed to be a study of why it won’t work. To be honest, in my my mind I substituted “real” for “ethical” because I really don’t know what “ethical food” is, but I’m intimately involved with getting actual food on the table for kids to eat, as a parent, a community activist and grower.
And it’s hard from all aspects. Really hard, but not impossible. And there are a lot of people up to the challenge. And I absolutely understand if it’s not a priority for many people.
I’m sorry if I’ve snapped at you before. I didn’t realize we had any prior communication.
I’m intimately involved with gettting actual food on the table for kids to eat as a parent (as a single parent to be exact, with no help from the other parent of the children at all in any way whatsoever); as a community activist though not one that makes noise but rather simply does things when possible where possible without any political attachment or rhetoric; and though not a grower I have lived in places where most of the people were growers though they were consistently plagued by the rural poverty that the rocky slightly poor soil and weather patterns held them in.
My post can be taken as a “why not” with a summary ending – or it can be taken as an information source for those who wish to know and conquer the “why nots”. The facts are there. In any thing one wants to accomplish the facts have to be known in a global sense in order to be sure to get all the ducks lined up all the way down the line. Nothing is perfect, and nothing is ever perfectly done.
I simply know that the average level of performance on any job in most places is not terribly inspired and the average level of performance will lead to things not being as wonderful as they should be unless either very accurate checks or alternately good bonuses can be built in to assure good performance. This needs to be taken into account when dealing with institutions that feed lots of people such as campuses or workplaces. Where those resources will come from is a question in my mind.