From the Garden to Glad: Students Fighting For Food Transparency
Watson Jones | September 22, 2022
Rae Milstead
Warren Wilson garden
Warren Wilson College (WWC) students Harvest Browder, Abe Corrigan, and Mac Clarke are making progress toward increasing the amount of local food used in campus dining spaces.
Browder, a member of the Garden Crew responsible for overseeing the sale of fresh produce to Sodexo, said that they are currently in conversation with Sodexo management about increasing student understanding and transparency regarding how the campus-grown food gets used in the Gladfelter dining hall.
While attempts at food transparency dialogue with previous general manager Brian O’Loughlin and previous Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Belinda Burke “didn't go so well,” Browder said that the new General Manager of Gladfelter, Barry Phillips, has been “a lot more responsive and willing to meet and talk.”
In addition to meetings between garden crew members and Gladfelter and Sodexo leadership, Browder expressed interest in setting up meetings with fellow students to help students understand the relationship between Sodexo and WWC. These student meetings will be recurring, available to those who want to participate and will be announced publicly when scheduled.
“[We want to] connect the food systems here on campus to students and make sure that they have a really thorough and transparent understanding of where their money's going, how it's being invested, how their food is getting prepared and how the food that's being grown on campus is getting into the cafeteria,” Browder said.
Browder, Corrigan and Clarke are not alone; Browder said that one of the Garden Crew’s more pressing objectives is working to provide more of the food used on campus.
“We’ve started doing that by seeding more produce and actually growing more than we have in the past, and really prioritizing getting the food to Gladfelter instead of our CSA,” Browder said.
A CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) according to the U.S Department of Agriculture. consists of a “community of individuals who pledge support to a farm operation. . . with the growers and consumers providing mutual support and sharing the risks and benefits of food production.”
The CSA functions similarly to a subscription service, where members of a community pay for a farm's produce on a scheduled basis, both providing the community with high-quality food and supporting local farms.
Over the summer, when students are mainly off campus, the majority of the garden’s produce goes to one of these CSA markets and the unsold produce is donated. This CSA market is necessary for the garden and constitutes a large amount of its annual income, selling regularly to a membership list of over 30 people.
When students arrive on campus in the fall semester, the need for produce on campus increases and the food is split in three separate directions. This need has pushed the garden to further prioritize keeping food on campus.
“We used to have a fall CSA, but after this last season, we're getting rid of the fall CSA so that all of that food can go straight to the cafeteria,” Browder said.
While this increases the amount of food remaining on campus, it decreases the revenue brought in by the Garden Crew. The prices of the produce sold to Gladfelter are set by Sodexo, not by the gardeners themselves, and are frequently less than what the food might sell for at a CSA.
The Garden Crew believes that the positive effect this shift has on the WWC community is more important than the lost revenue.
“It's really more about making sure that students here are eating and have access to the produce that is being grown,” Browder said.
Clarke said that he’s concerned about the nutritional quality of the current WWC meal plan.
“On the website, we advertise that 40% [current WWC website states 25%] of the food we eat is from local farms,” Clarke said. “That number is not currently correct.”
Rae Milstead
To the estimate of the group, the real number is somewhere around 15-18%. One of the group’s goals is to get that number up to around 50% — meaning half of all food in the group would be sourced locally. While the Local Foods Crew supervised this project in the past, the crew no longer exists to monitor how much food is actually being locally sourced.
Clarke said that one of the group's goals, in addition to food system transparency, is to help students develop a more clear financial understanding of how much they are paying for food and where exactly that money goes.
For students who are looking to get involved in the ongoing push for local food on campus or who want to learn more about WWC’s relationship with the Sodexo corporation, keep an eye out for announcements regarding upcoming public meetings, or reach out to Harvest Browder at 843-304-1626 or hbrowder.f18@warren-wilson.edufor more information.