This year's first-annual Local Foods Week highlights Dartmouth's environmentally-conscious reputation with an effort to create awareness about local food options at Dartmouth Dining Services.
Working under the local non-profit organization Vital Communities, the Local Food Week hopes to educate students about Valley Food and Farm's efforts to bring more locally grown products to DDS.
The Vital Communities effort has already met with some success. DDS recently introduced ground beef from a regional conglomeration of cattle farmers, called 500 Farms, to the Homeplate Grill.
The 500 Farms brand definitely provides a regional option to DDS's repertoire, but the use of "local beef" is sensitive due to state regulations over the use of the phrase, according to DDS purchasing manager Beth DiFrancesco.
DiFrancesco said DDS decided to provide local beef because they could afford to do so and recognized the value to the community.
Anna Guenther '08, a Valley Food and Farm intern and the week's organizer, provided some justification for the events of the week, emphasizing the popularity of local foods at other schools and the overall problems with eating "institutionalized" food.
At Yale University, Berkely Dining Hall provides a complete array of local food, or organic when local is unavailable, to students and its success is notable.
"Yale is really famous for this -- there are people who line up one-half hour before [Berkely] opens to eat there," Guenther said.
DDS has its own plans to provide students with more local produce later this spring, an area they have not strongly pursued in the past, according to DiFrancesco.
In past summers DDS used food from the Dartmouth organic farm in Collis Cafe, but the organic farm cannot provide sufficiently for year-round consumption, nor for venues beyond Collis.
Vital Communities works with DDS primarily in order to promote local agriculture, according to DiFrancesco, although some student health concerns also exist. DiFrancesco noted, however, that this is not DDS's main purpose for offering local foods.
Some of the problems with processed meat include suppliers such as Tyson, the major producer of DDS chicken. Journalist Eric Schlosser documented Tyson's practice of feeding baby chicks with discarded pieces of their adult counterparts, in his book "Fast Food Nation."
DiFrancesco also noted the problems presented in another highly-publicized fast food critique, the movie "SuperSize Me." She said that items such as DDS chicken nuggets could very well be composed from parts of many different chickens, a shocking point in the movie.
"It's just a really terrible industry," Guenther said about more main stream industrial meat sources. She noted that meat, such as the hamburgers from Homeplate that come from smaller, more local farms, provide better options for students concerned with these issues.
"If you eat food from these farms where the farmers take pride in what they're doing and take care of these animals, it's just so much better," Guenther said.
Guenther felt content about her experience with DDS and her work to create more local food options.
"I don't think it's feasible to ask everyone to boycott DDS as a whole. We don't ever want it to be antagonistic," Guenther said, "My experience with DDS has been all wonderful. Beth [DiFrancesco] has been very agreeable, she wants to work it out as much as we do."
