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Getting Ourselves Back to the Garden
November/December 2007
by Melinda Tuhus
The Yale Sustainable
Food Project, Melina Shannon-DiPietro and Josh Viertel will tell you, bears the
seeds of a revolution in eating. More than that, they will say, it’s a way to
understand and even heal many of the pressing global issues of the day. If all
this sounds idealistic, take it as a sign that these two believe in what they're
doing. They’re the directors of the Sustainable Food Project, and nobody ever
yet accused the project of thinking small.
The
project began in 2001 as a
collaboration among students, faculty, staff, and the celebrated chef Alice
Waters. Since then it has grown, as it were, organically. Today the project has
three different branches, with tendrils reaching into many different fields of
campus life.
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The Yale Farm also yields educational fruit. |
The picturesque part
of the project is the Yale Farm, a one-acre organic garden on Edwards Street
between Whitney Avenue and Prospect Street. On an early fall visit recently, it
was alive with sunflowers and zinnias, neat rectangular patches of radicchio,
endive, and escarole, and thriving winter crops such as parsnips and carrots.
Tomato plants were still putting forth those juicy, flavorful red fruits that
bear no resemblance to the travel-hardened versions sold in stores. Later, in
midwinter, hardy greens will be growing in unheated greenhouses.
The farm sends most of
its pesticide-free produce to a city greenmarket, and some goes to feed the
students and other volunteers who blend compost into the soil and tend the
crops. But the farm also yields educational fruit. Six undergraduate interns
work the garden every summer, learning about sustainable farming, and Yale
professors and New Haven schoolteachers bring their students here regularly to
learn about ecology and agriculture.
A second branch of the
project, and by far the best known, is Yale’s dining hall revolution. It
started in Berkeley College, where, in 2003, the staff began developing a
dining hall menu that was not only locally grown and largely organic but
actually tasty. For a few delicious
years, Berkeley was the institutional-food equivalent of a three-star
restaurant. “Students counterfeited IDs and attempted bribing dining hall staff
to get in,” recalls Shannon-DiPietro. The Berkeley pilot project, funded by a
sympathetic donor, was expensive but successful: within a year, every
residential college had adopted a few of the new, locally grown dishes. As of
September 2007, the pilot project is over, and Berkeley is again just one
college dining hall among many. But now all of those dining halls serve a menu
with 40 percent local items.
Graduate and
professional students, or at least those whose schools have cafeterias, are for
the most part still waiting for the food revolution. In October, however, the
underground Cross Campus Library (now the Bass Library), reopened—and its
“Machine City” vending machine hub has been replaced by a new sustainable-food
café.
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Graduate and professional students are still waiting for the food revolution. |
The ingredients for
Yale’s local and organic food come not from the Yale Farm, which is far too
small for the volume, but from a network of regional growers whose operations
the Food Project personnel trust. “We work with dozens of farmers and
purveyors,” says Shannon-DiPietro. “The big benefit [to the farmers] is there's
guaranteed volume and a guaranteed market, and that means we’re taking some of
the unpredictability out of farming.”
That’s mostly true—though
it remains a business relationship. George Purtill added five acres to his
86-acre farm in Glastonbury two years ago for growing tomatoes, garlic, onions,
and peppers to be turned into salsa for Yale. But this year Yale wasn’t buying.
“It reduced our income,” he says, “because we had counted on that, and they
decided not to do it because they still had salsa left.”
This
year’s tomatoes aside, Purtill is
enthusiastic about his relationship with staff and students at the Food
Project. “I think it’s great. They have a great passion for what they’re doing."
he says. Moreover, “a lot of schools are seeking to emulate them in one way or
another.” As a direct result of his collaboration with Yale, he’s now selling
produce to Wesleyan University and St. Joseph College, and the University of
Connecticut and Trinity College are interested.
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Student leaders will
convene at Yale for the first Real Food Summit. |
The purchasing aspect
brings in some of those pressing global issues. Shannon-DiPietro is painfully
aware that it takes 400 gallons of crude oil to produce a year’s food supply
for the average American. Much of that is transportation. Because the Food
Project brings in food from nearby, she points out, it is one way for Yale to
cut carbon output.
Education and research
about the links between your dinner and the larger environment make up the Food
Project’s third element. In addition to using the Yale Farm as a teaching site,
the project assists in and hosts courses, speakers, and conferences. In
November, student leaders on sustainable food from across the Northeast will
convene at Yale for the first Real Food Summit. Ultimately, says Josh Viertel, “the
ecological footprint of a university’s operations are dwarfed by the decisions
made by the leaders it produces. The project helps create future leaders who
have a deep ecological understanding of our food decisions.”  |
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