Let’s talk about food.

Think about the last chicken queso you ordered at the Hop-do you know what kind of chicken you’re eating, what kind of cheese? You get the salmon special at Homeplate¬where did the salmon come from, and the side of green beans? Or how about an average meal at Collis-where do we buy our eggs, our lettuce, our broccoli?

Ask around among the DDS purchasers and managers, and you’ll find that all campus chicken is Tyson boneless skinless 6 oz breast. This chicken, all other meat and poultry, those Homeplate green beans, the tortillas for your queso, and the spinach and mushrooms in your Collis omelet-all come from a wholesale foods company (Vistar) in Windsor, Connecticut. Salad bar produce and fruits come from Upper Valley Produce in West Lebanon, which gets most of its food from the Boston Market.

Now let’s talk about local food.

It may seem like there’s nothing fresh or local about DDS food, but that’s not entirely the case. Some of the Upper Valley Produce fruits and vegetables are actually locally grown and bought from one of the 12 Upper Valley farmers’ markers. DDS’s cheddar cheese and yogurt are Cabot-a relatively local Vermont dairy company. Salmon and other fresh fish specials come Black River Produce in Vermont. Our milk comes from Crowley Dairy in Manchester, which gets most of its supply from New Hampshire dairy farms, and when in season, of the lettuce and vegetables you find in the salad bar come fresh from the Dartmouth Organic Farm.

And while we’re on the subject, let’s talk about the Upper Valley.

In getting to know our Upper Valley neighbors, you will find that¬outside of the “island of affluence” that is Dartmouth, as Professor Jack Shepherd of the ENVS department puts it-we are surrounded by poverty and malnutrition. 6.5 percent of New Hampshire residents and 9.4% of Vermont residents live below the poverty level. 7.5 percent of NH residents are food insecure and almost 1/6 of Vermont residents receive food aid from the food stamps program, local pantries and community kitchens.

When we throwaway uneaten food in our dining halls, we should be thinking not the standard motherly guilt trip “people are starving in Africa,” but “people are hungry here in our own community. ”

If you follow the path of the food we eat beyond our plates, trashcans and kitchens and back to the farms (assuming we’re talking about the rare case where DDS buys locally grown small farm foods), you’ll discover two things: local farmers are in a bit of an economic pickle, and, oddly enough a lot of good food goes to waste in the farmers’ fields.

Just ask Lisa Johnson, coordinator of Vital Communities, a regional nonprofit community life organization, what the face of hunger looks like in the Upper Valley. She’ll sit you down in her office next to the White River Junction train station, and in a soft, kind voice guide you through the economics of poverty and its linkages to agriculture in the Upper Valley. “Many of the people who are hungry are the working poor,” she’ll tell you, “and many of those people are farmers.” She speaks without any hint of irony, but with a sense oftiredness.

It has indeed become a classic story-the small scale farmer loses business to big corporate farms far away, gives up and sells his land. Soon thereafter he’ll come back to find his formerly fertile soil has given way to a parking lot or housing development. And so it goes, many of us might say with detachment.

But Johnson has another point to make. After painting the story of the Upper Valley farmer in trouble, she adds with a bit more pep, “If you know your neighbors then you can inform yourself and act on your values.”

And now that we’re informed, it’s time to act.

One group of students-inspired by an AmeriCorp gleaning project that came through the area a few years ago-has created a project to bring this excess produce back into the community. All around the Upper Valley, lots of perfectly nutritious harvest crops are left in the fields to rot because they are unmarketable. Farmers regularly have to pay workers to glean these excess crops at the end of the harvest season. Some farms donate some of their gleaned produce to local pantries, but for the most part the wasted food merely joins the farms’ compost pile.

Led by Becca Heller ‘05, an energetic community service addict with a much better sense of Upper Valley life than most Dartmouth students, the group decided to do something about this inefficiency. The team researched hunger, food aid and gleaning programs and wrote a rather ambitious final paper this past summer for ENVS 39. The paper is also rather practical, as they have come up with a proposal for a gleaning program for Dartmouth students and the Upper Valley to begin this fall.

Student volunteers will receive training on proper gleaning techniques from Dartmouth Organic Farm manager Scott Stokoe, and fifteen local farms have shown interest in having these volunteers do them the favor of gleaning their fields. Ideally, the produce will be frozen into prepared meals in DDS kitchens¬possibly under the wing of a national organization called C amp usKitchens that runs similar programs at other universities across the country-and distributed to local pantries.

Stokoe and other local farmers are quite excited about the proposal. “I look forward,” he says, “to the day when we can create a more organized program, whereby students would be able to complete community service at the farm by helping raise food that will be designated for area food banks.” That day is drawing near.

The student group is currently applying to become a certified community service organization under the Tucker Foundation. This will allow for a steady student volunteer base so that farms can get gleaners on short-term notice when they need them. Students will be in direct communication with the local farmers, and with the local food pantries and soup kitchens.

Somewhat similar on-campus initiatives have worked in the past. Facilities have had student run programs (mainly through Tucker) in which leftovers were saved and frozen daily for student volunteers to deliver to local food pantries. Perishables like milk and produce have also been sent to pantries at the end of a term. DDS director Richard Rossiter, one of the many unseen faces behind our daily meals, notes that these programs have been successful, but that “the program is only as strong as the student(s) who are involved.”

Student initiative is a powerful tool for enacting change. When it comes to on-campus food waste, ECO and the compost fairies have done an incredible job in recent years annoying much of the campus into taking the time to compost and recycle. Of Dartmouth’s almost 3,000 tons of waste per year, we compost almost 10 percent of that and divert another 18 percent from landfills by recycling and other waste reduction initiatives. (Our compost, by the way, goes to a facility out by DHMC that turns most of it to mulch fertilizer for Dartmouth and other local landscaping companies. )

If students can put as much time and energy into the gleaning project as Lisa Johnson and DDS administrators have into their new local foods purchasing project, then this is going to be an exciting fall for Dartmouth and the local food network.

Johnson has created a collaborative project to institute in the next few years a local food purchasing program for Dartmouth. Participants in the project include representatives from DDS, the College administration, the Environmental Studies Department, UNH, the University of Vermont Cooperative Extension Services and Center for Sustainable Agriculture, Upper Valley Produce, Northeast Organic Farming Association of VT, and-perhaps most importantly¬Dartmouth students.

The project will run as a two year national Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) grant. The pre-proposal (already approved by SARE) states that in the first year the group will form a Dartmouth Local Foods task force that will do logistical feasibility research, choose which foods to introduce to DDS, and recruit and train local farmers to partake in the project. The following year DDS will implement the plan with marketing and educational initiatives in hopes of involving students and student organizations like ECO. If it works-which depends on student response-we’ll keep it.

Buying locally for an institutional food service is really difficult, according to DDS purchasing manager Beth DiFrancesco. For a dining system that works with set prices, she explains, the variable quality and quantity and often higher price of local foods make it risky and complicated to buy locally. The Dartmouth dining system works in such a way that students choose what food items they want before they purchase, which in marketing terms for DDS means that the food must have a grocery quality appearance to keep the customers satisfied.

“Mass produced com and com from a local farmer’s market just don’t look the same,” notes DiFrancesco, “and a lot of students don’t understand that.”

After only a few minutes speaking with her about the local food project, it becomes clear that she has the energy and heart to make this project happen, despite the logistical difficulties.

“I think that we have an obligation to help,” she says amidst piles of purchasing paperwork in her office in the basement of Thayer. “I drive to work in the mornings and pass all these beautiful fields, and I think ‘why aren’t we buying some ofthis food?’”

Johnson notes that even if DDS only buys 5 percent of its food locally, that is a huge commitment and will have a significant impact on the local agricultural community. DiFrancesco and Johnson have met a number of times in planning the project proposal, and both of them explain the value of the project with the catchphrase, “It may only open the door to Dartmouth a crack, but it’s a very big door.”

How the college will choose to go about incorporating more local foods into its purchasing remains undecided. The first year of grant research will focus largely on how best to help the local farming community and effectively incorporate the foods into DDS. For example, small scale dairy farms are in a lot of trouble right now: over half of Upper Valley dairies have shut down in the last fifteen years. While the remaining farms are growing, the price of milk and profit per cow is steadily declining. Dartmouth could support these farmers’ businesses by buying their milk. But could small¬scale farms even produce enough for Dartmouth’s needs, and if so, would they still be able to provide for farmers’ markets and the rest of the local community as well?

Alternatively, Dartmouth could offer a variety of local foods at one of its dining areas. Collis is the prime choice here for a number of reasons. It already espouses the healthy eating image, drawing a lot of the “crunchy” eco-conscious students on campus as well as those who just appreciate fresh produce. Though Collis has a few staple foods-omelets, breakfast and deli sandwiches, pasta and stir-fry-it has more freedom than a lot of the other campus dining facilities in its menu options. The cafe functions like a scratch bakery, using and reusing the ingredients, produce and leftovers they have available. Where food court cooks may have trouble coming up with a popular menu item containing rhubarb, for example, Collis can get away with making a chilled rhubarb soup, and people eat it. Collis already has a working relationship with a local farm-the Dartmouth Organic Farm supplies collies with fresh lettuce, broccoli, squash, cucumbers, etc. DDS Manager Don Reed somehow found some time away from the business of running Collis-even if he did have to meet me in Lone Pine and not his office so as to avoid a barrage of people looking to speak to him-to talk with me about his experience with buying locally.

Reed speaks highly of doing business with Stokoe and the organic farm, but notes that there indeed are difficulties. The variability of the farm produce supply poses a challenge-while most of Collis lettuce in the summer comes from the farm, for example, a simple complication like a groundhog nibbling at a few rows of lettuce means that Reed needs to order from Upper Valley Produce as well. Reed separates and labels the two in the salad bar so that students know when they’re eating produce from the organic farm.

Reed supports the SARE project and the idea of a greener Collis. “As long as quality is good and price comparable,” he says, “I’m willing to do more local business.” Already Collis buys its eggs from a local farmer, and small things like maple syrup when available. But Reed worries that even a facility as small as Collis might wipe out local supplies of things like honey, which the cafe goes through very quickly in baking and smoothies.

Finding the right balance of local and wholesale foods that will benefit both the college and the community is a primary goal of the grant project. But the biggest concern Reed, Johnson and DiFrancesco all mention is that of seasonal availability.

Timing is a problem. “The peak harvest time,” Reed notes, “is usually around late August, early September¬right when the students are all home on break”. Students accustomed to having tomatoes available year round in the salad bar might get irritated with the lack of availability if Dartmouth chose to buy only fresh, local tomatoes. Equally, when com harvesting time hits the Upper Valley and DDS puts com on the menu in some shape or form three or four nights a week, students might find fault with the lack of variety.

The timing problem highlights the fact that the project will require a lot of communication. Farmers will need to be in close contact with DDS purchasers, managers and cooks about which crops are available for any given week or month, and in what quantities. Advanced meal planning will become difficult and rigid routine purchasing patterns will have to be more flexible.

All this communication requires a lot of time and extra work for DDS personnel. Those working on the project behind the scenes though are willing to give the extra time and help Dartmouth better connect with the surrounding community. “People ought to know we do a lot of good stuff, the college does a lot of good stuff,” says DiFrancesco of Dartmouth’s community involvement, “We’re just not good about telling people about it. ”

Having local food as a significant part of our dining services here has the potential to be an eye-opening, educational experience for staff and students alike. Dynamic and changing food availability will urge students to think about what we eat and where it comes from. On campus marketing and communication about where menu items come from locally will help students begin to see the connection between what we eat and the community that is feeding us.

Another avenue available this fall for students to better understand that connection is through the Tucker Foundation’s COMMUNiversITY.

COMMUNiversITY is an educational program designed to foster student awareness and advocacy regarding local community issues. This fall the class will focus on food and agriculture.

All these food projects happening at the same time made me kind of suspicious. When I asked project leader Beth Halpern, a fresh new Tucker AmericaCorp intern, if the topic was chosen for its timeliness, she laughed and claimed that it’s just a coincidence. Regardless, she’s aware of the other projects and plans to make use of the convenient timing.

“The food issue fits in well right now,” Helpburn explains, “We’ll be able to deal with specific local issues and not just talk about advocacy.” The fall communiversity group will learn about global and local agricultural issues, while participating in the Dartmouth Local Foods task force, and hopefully in the gleaning project as well.

It seems that in the area of food, we’re finally striking a reasonable balance between thinking globally and acting locally, as the bumper sticker saying goes, in a community that extends beyond the borders of Hanover.

Similar initiatives have come and gone in the past, but never have we had such an exciting convergence of individual, unique projects each aimed at increasing community involvement via the local food network. The success of both the gleaning project and the DDS local purchasing grant project will depend on student involvement and interest. Students have a genuine opportunity this fall to discover the community around us through these initiatives, and to become more active members ofthat community.

Brooking Gatewood ‘05 is an Environmental Studies Major and editor of this magazine. She especially enjoys Collis’s African Peanut Soup and hopes that someday it will be made with locally grown peanuts.