Good Eats? Food on WWC Campus
Harley Woods | March 24, 2022
On a fog-filled Thursday evening in late February, senior Abe Corrigan sat in a room full of windows, speaking quickly and passionately about the value of where his food comes from.
Quinn Bonney
WWC students Ada Lambert and James Davis sit in the Gladfelter dining hall for dinner.
“Going forward, we want to talk about being an environmentally conscious school,” Corrigan said. “The system needs to be called into question especially since we have the land and labor and people want to.”
The Warren Wilson College (WWC) dining hall known as Gladfelter is located at the heart of campus and serves three meals a day, including a hot line, a salad bar, a pizza counter, a sandwich station and a dessert kiosk. All dining operations on campus — not limited to Gladfelter — receive their product shipments from food distributor giant Sodexo Food Group.
While food is purchased through Sodexo, the food provider linked to the company, Sysco, runs the growing and farming operations.
Over the past academic year, students have called into question whether this corporate giant is ethical and whether it adequately represents Warren Wilson standards.
Those standards can be identified in the student handbook, which states the following under section 3.5.0: “The Director of WIDE (wilson inclusion, diversity and equity) works with campus constituents and partners in the development of programs and administering of policies related to inclusion, diversity, and equity across the Triad (community service, academics and work).”
Harvest Browder, a junior and a worker on the Garden Crew, believes that students’ voices should be acknowledged in conversations around their food.
“Your decision on how and when you want to feed yourself and what that should look like and where that should come from is completely up to you,” Browder said. “That is my basic human right, especially when (students) pay so much to go here. You have that right to decide how things should go about on campus.”
Sodexo Food Group is based out of Paris, France with a U.S. headquarters in Gaithersburg, Maryland. The U.S. operations of Sodexo account for 43% of its global activities.
One of the critiques students have about WWC’s partnering with Sodexo is the international and industrial food sourcing it is built on. In a virtual meeting with Brian O’Loughlin and the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Warren Wilson, Belinda Burke, these concerns were addressed.
Sodexo operates in 72 countries and is the largest contract company in Europe, according to O’Loughlin. This corporate giant is, however, more than simply a global cafeteria. A subsidiary of Sodexo, called Sodexo Justice Services, operates private prisons in the United Kingdom (UK) and Australia.
“They don’t have any prison business in the United States at all,” O’Loughlin said. “They still do in Europe; they still do in Australia. They look at it more as training, so they help train people to get jobs on the outside when they get out of prison.”
What is a private prison? Owned and operated by various corporations, the more inmates a private prison holds for a longer period of time increases the amount of money that a private prison makes.
“The for-profit or private prisons are out there for monetary gains,” the Freeman Online article stated. “That’s their primary goal.”
The U.S. Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) — a subsection of the Department of Justice (DOJ) — released a lengthy report titled “Emerging Issues of Privatized Prisons.” Not only has the DOJ made public its intention on phasing out the use of private prisons, but it has recognized inherent flaws within the private prison industry.
“The profit motive will inhibit the proper performance of duties,” the report stated on page 14. “Private prisons have financial incentives to cut corners.”
Page 48 of this monograph shows that the number of assaults on inmate violations occur at 35.1% per 1,000 inmates in private prisons compared to 25.4% per 1,000 inmates in public prisons. Among those resulting in inmate deaths per 1,000 inmates, private prisons have 0% while public prisons have 0.1%.
One source, the Private Corrections Working Group, cites incidents at private prisons in Scotland.
“The allegations regarding the West Lothian institution were made by insiders sickened by the way the privately operated jail is being run,” the website stated. “The crisis in the prison has prompted calls for the Scottish Government to step in and sort out the jail, run by Sodexo.”
Browder believes that issues such as Sodexo’s background and local food promotion on campus contribute to the difficulty that students have with accessing information at Warren Wilson.
“A lot of this is about transparency,” Browder said. “I’m giving WWC my money and Sodexo my money, so I’m investing in both of these institutions and companies and so I deserve to know what I’m contributing to and what I’m helping to support. Having those figures should be accessible all the time, knowing what amount of my money is going where. It’s the bare minimum to have a level of transparency.”
Browder struggled to remove the meal plan from their tuition payment in the fall of 2021. After asking why they were only refunded a small portion of their room and board, the answer remained unclear.
“You pay the college for the meal plan,” O’Loughlin said. “Then the college pays us per student part of what the student pays for their room and board. The other part that they’ve not paid us is for the upkeep of the buildings, whether it be Sunderland or whether it be Gladfelter.”
Browder and Corrigan have brainstormed other solutions to tackle the issue of where their food comes from. The duo believes that WWC farm and garden land can produce far more than what it is currently growing.
The two students seek to create a sustainable solution to food production where half of all food at WWC is grown and farmed on campus with the other half coming from a regional food provider.
Burke believes, however, that a regional food provider would not be equipped to meet college-level demands or services.
Browder has hope that the farm and garden can do more than they are currently to approach this goal.
“While it’s not a super viable source of income for the garden, at the end of the day that shouldn’t matter,” said Browder. “It should be the fact that students are able to eat the very food that we are living and breathing right next to from the ground and have a better relationship with the food that they are consuming on campus.”
This is something that O’Loughlin agrees with.
“I’ll be honest with you, the amount of food in the past three years we’ve been getting has decreased, not increased, which I’m not happy about,” O’Loughlin said. “I manage the Local Foods Crew, or the supervisor of it, and our goal is to serve as much local food as we can. We also use a local produce called Mountain Foods Produce, which is located in the farmer’s market here in Asheville, and they source locally for us also.”
The previous supervisor of Local Foods Crew, Annie McGehrin, left her work at the college for a new job opportunity. McGehrin’s last week in the office was the week of March 7.
A former member of Local Foods Crew stated that the crew is dissolving as a result. The member was told that the crew would not meet the weekly hour requirement with the Work Program Office (WPO) without a supervisor.
A Local Foods Crew responsibility included tracking the percentage of locally sourced food on campus per month.
The WWC website states that 34% of all food served on campus is grown and purchased locally or grown on campus.
However, another former student and member of the Local Foods Crew shared in an email that the number of local foods being sourced was inaccurate.
“At the end of the first semester (McGehrin) was advertising 20-25% locally-sourced food, when in reality that number was less than 13%,” they said. “She did make a few improvements because when we started that semester the number sat around 9%. ”
O’Loughlin stated that his philosophy is to allow students at Warren Wilson to be the first to eat what the land produces. In the contract, it is written that Sodexo will purchase as much WWC-produced and locally-sourced food as possible. All ground beef, breakfast sausage, lamb and eggs come from the WWC farm.
O’Loughlin has a strong belief that by working together, WWC in conjunction with Sodexo, that more change can happen. He included that he has had the same conversation with students in the past regarding Sodexo’s involvement at WWC.
“What I also say to students is, if you want to be a little commune and you can try to grow your own food and do all this, you’re just going to be a little blip on the big page,” O’Loughlin said. “Or you can work with a company like us and help us change and help us do better.”
A question that was consistently raised by both Burke and O’Loughlin was that if WWC’s food provider was not Sodexo, who would it be?
Corrigan and Browder plan to search for regional food providers with historical backgrounds that align more closely with WWC’s philosophy.
Burke and O’Loughlin stated that Sodexo food serves high quality food and that restaurants across the country source through Sodexo. However, an organization devoted to healthier lifestyles called, “Is it bad for you?,” rated Sodexo food quality an F, according to an article by The Charger Bulletin.
“They are a mass produced food service company with great marketing,” the review said. “The food may sound healthy, but it is heavily processed and high in carbohydrates, fat and chemicals.”
The Charger Bulletin article also cited that stomach discomfort is the stand alone short term symptom from consumption of Sodexo food.
Despite the attempted communication of student concerns with Sodexo, the fact remains that in the summer of 2021, Warren Wilson re-signed their contract with the company for another ten years.
“We are in a contract with Sodexo, and I don’t see the college — unless Sodexo did not live up to the terms of their agreement — us breaking our contract with them,” Burke said. “I want to make sure that as you guys are thinking through all this that you are understanding that aspect of it.”
As the meeting with Browder, Corrigan, Burke and O’Loughlin came to a close, the CFO and dining manager agreed that the conversation about ways to improve local food and WWC grown food could continue.
The students plan to continue organizing and communicating with other students regarding how food is provided and consumed on campus.
“There’s problems that just trickle down and will inevitably trickle down into so many areas and facets,” Browder said. “When we recognize them within our own community, we recognize them within the greater world and when we exercise ways to improve this community, we are exercising ways that we can leave this community and improve it in the outer world.”