The Office of Sustainability has awarded two student grants of $2,000 one to support Joe Pearl '11 as he builds a root cellar at Dartmouth's Organic Farm, and another to assist Cristina Pellegrini '11 as she takes on issues of food-related sustainability at the College. The grants were funded by profits of the Move-Out/Move-In Sale, according to Sustainability Director Rosi Kerr.
Proposals from both Pellegrini and Pearl met the criteria of "projects that were do-able within a relatively reasonable time frame, that would have a measurable sustainability impact and projects for which the grant would make a material difference," Kerr said. The students' past involvement in campus sustainability efforts also demonstrated that they were likely to succeed, according to Kerr.
The root cellar that Pearl hopes to construct will store root crops including potatoes, turnips, carrots, beets and radishes, making it possible for locally-grown fresh vegetables to be eaten year-round, according to Pearl.
"Root cellars have been part of agriculture in New England for hundreds of years, and in terms of Dartmouth's efforts to become a more sustainable institution, it has to look critically at how and where we get our food and who it affects," Pearl said. "With the rise of refrigeration and other methods that use a lot of carbon, like transportation and refrigeration people have lost track of the fact that there are ways to store vegetables and eat locally year-round."
The cellar will increase student awareness about the "carbon miles" associated with shipping food and raise student interaction with the Organic Farm, Pearl said.
Involvement in the construction of the cellar will also "give students an amazing hands-on opportunity to make something real and lasting," he said.
Pearl said he anticipates construction of the root cellar to start in the spring and continue throughout the summer.
Participating in the construction of the Organic Farm's pizza oven during Pearl's freshman fall introduced him to the possibility of building something useful through "student initiative and staff rapport," he said.
Pearl said he worked on an organic farm last summer where he was "struck by the simplicity and utility of the root cellars."
A geography and Arabic double major, Pearl has been working on the Organic Farm since his freshman year and has been involved in the Dartmouth Coalition for Climate Change, he said.
Pellegrini, an environmental studies major, will use her grant to implement a more sustainable food system for Dartmouth. Pellegrini will increase student awareness of sustainable food issues and the amount of local and organic food in Dartmouth's dining halls, she said.
Pellegrini said she hopes to expand compost systems campus-wide, organize the donation of leftover food to local charities, reduce the amount of food-related packaging used by Dartmouth's dining halls and find a use for cooking oil waste.
"[Dartmouth Dining Services] are doing great things right now, but I feel like it's not being communicated well to the students," Pellegrini said.
As part of her initiative to increase education about food issues, Pellegrini said she will encourage the College to increase course offerings that focus on food justice, food security and agriculture.
She will also work with the College's nutritionists, explore athletes' dietary needs and form partnerships with local farmers and other food producers.
"It's a matter of networking with other institutions and also within Dartmouth itself, talking to folks in DDS, professors, people in the Office of Sustainability and students, seeing what people's needs are, what our limitations are and what challenges we're going to have to overcome," Pellegrini said.
Pellegrini began studying the food sustainability programs at schools similar to Dartmouth while she was enrolled in the class "Food and Power."
"Dartmouth is kind of behind the times when it comes to sustainability and food," she said. "Yale [University] and Stanford [University] and Middlebury [College] are great models to look at, but no program is perfect and our school is different."
Pellegrini will live in Hanover while working on her project this spring, though she will not be taking classes at the College. Her first steps toward implementing her project will be to gather information from other institutions about their food sustainability models and put together a proposal to present to College officials.
"Once I have a model that I can bring to the administration, I would like to convey to them how it will benefit the College and the community and the Upper Valley at large and I would love to get the go-ahead to possibly start implementing this project," Pellegrini said. "Working through the bureaucracy of the College is a very [time-consuming] process that can take a lot longer than you might anticipate."
The summer before her matriculation at Dartmouth, Pellegrini said she learned she could no longer eat gluten and was forced to more closely examine the content of her food.
"It made me start to question what exactly is going into all these packaged foods that I once thought of as healthy, and take a step back and look into the food industry itself," she said.
Pellegrini also cited her time living in the Sustainable Living Center and a past summer spent working on an organic farm as part of her inspiration for her proposal. As a co-founder of Dartmouth Ecovores a student group which attempts to raise awareness about the origins of food and its environmental and social impacts she became more aware of issues surrounding food, she said.
The most recent Sustainable Move-In Sale, during the 2010 Orientation, made $8,500 in profits, according to Sarah Frostenson '11, the Sustainable Move-Out/Move-In Sale Intern.
Sustainable Move-Out/Move-In, which began in 2006, collects used furniture from student dorms and resells it to students and community members.
The Sustainable Move-Out/Move In sale occurs each September in order to "divert stuff from the landfills and to fund student initiatives which have not been successful in the past, which is why we're really excited this year to award $4,000 in total," Frostenson said.
In the past, profits from the sales have supported smaller-scale community and student projects, according to Frostenson. The Office of Sustainability plans to make similar grants available in future years, though the amount they are able to award will depend on the sale's profits, according to Kerr.
"One of the things I love about working at Dartmouth is Dartmouth students are uniquely action-oriented and excited to solve problems, especially complicated challenges like sustainability," Kerr said. "The office is really excited about increasing opportunities to help students do exactly that, to make Dartmouth a leader in sustainability, not just nationally but in the world."
Frostenson is a member of The Dartmouth Staff.
