Real Food Speaker on Community

The desire to eat local, real food has become rooted in our food culture on campus. Defining real as local, fair, humane and ecologically sound, members of Eat Real set out to discover how much food in the dining hall fulfilled at least two of the four criteria mentioned. After tracking food production last October and March, the club discovered that 23 percent of the food provided by our dining halls was real, according to Eat Real’s standards. From this research, Eat Real has established a commitment for dining halls to reach 30 percent by 2016.

Real Food Week was created to celebrate Eat Real’s past successes and address what still needs to be accomplished. From a barbeque with local meat to sharing a meal with Head Chef of Atwater Ian Martin and the Executive Manager for Dining Services Robert Cleveland to listening to a discussion on migrant labor in Vermont featuring a panel of real food challenge interns, the camaraderie behind the various activities of Real Food Week demonstrated that the dining hall’s pursuit of local, sustainable food is one of the top priority on campus.

Abbey Willard, the keynote speaker of the week’s festivities, came to campus to talk about her job as the Local Foods Administrator for the Vermont Agency of Agriculture. With a Bachelor’s degree in Soils and Environmental Science from Montana State University and a Master’s degree in Science in Environmental Studies from Green Mountain College, Willard highlighted her efforts to increase local food procurement in Vermont and support community-based food system collaborations within the state and throughout New England, as well as how such efforts of local, sustainable food production evoke change in communities.

Willard believes that local food systems and community go hand and hand.

“What I love about this is that growing local food systems is about building a community that recreates agriculture as an honorable occupation, sees Vermont’s rural character as a driving force in our state’s economy and works towards access for healthy and local food for all,” Willard said.

This relationship between community and food is driven by Willard’s experiences as a child. Raised in rural Peacham, Vt., Willard and her three siblings grew up attending multi-generational family gatherings oriented around “enjoying the meal preparation, sitting down and appreciating good food that tastes good,” she said. “I came at agriculture from a different place … a place of love for food and for family. Meals represent a sense of community, family, healthy habits and love.”

With a background sensitive to collaborative food production, Willard and her partner started Ridge Meadows Farm, which raised 100 percent grass-fed beef and lamb and pastured pork and poultry.

“Through my on-the-ground experience, I even more now can value the labor of love that accompanies our food production,” she said.

A year and a half ago, Willard decided to give up the farm, however. Worn down by the demanding and difficult lifestyle it required, she approached the issues of food systems and agricultural production from a new angle.

Willard pointed to the transition from a traditional supply chain to a value chain as the spark behind the eating local movement.

“No longer are we just trying to get more people, more food. Instead, consumers are so much more aware of where their food comes from, who produces it and how it’s being grown,” she said. “We are now assigning value to our food.”

“We believe these are important questions to be asking and it is also important to recognize that Real Food Week fosters discussion about these topics but does not seek to answer them necessarily, since they are inherently complex,” EatReal intern Robin Weisselberg ’16.5 said.

Willard said that 1 in 6 Americans go out of their way to buy local products. Specifically in Vermont, there are 81 farmers markets (a 351 percent increase from the 19 that existed in the state in 1986), over 100 organic CSA farms, 20 winter farmers markets, Farm to School programs in 85 schools (which is 26 percent of the state’s public school system), 20 different food hubs that have regionally organized to work on local food issues, 3 new processing facilities and expansion among existing facilities.

“You all live in a state that is a success story of community based agriculture and that’s because we recognize that local and regional food system development is about relationships, communication, and building trust amongst people at the community level,” Willard said. “And our small town and rural character really makes us good at that.”

With the goal being to increase local food consumption, Willard addressed the complexities of defining what it means for food to be local.

“Local is not universally defined and there are no regulated standards behind it,” she said.

For example, the Vermont Fresh Network, which works directly with Vermont restaurants and retail establishments, defines local to mean anything purchased from producers in the state of Vermont. Black River Produce, however, defines local as anything that can be picked up on a day’s drive, meaning the establishment relies on produce from parts of Massachusetts and New York and does not reach parts of Vermont.

Health Care Without Harm, an organization that works with health care establishments around the country, defines local as anything with greater than 50 percent of ingredients produced or processed within 250 miles of each establishment. Similar to our school’s own challenge to define what real food means, efforts to define local is equally controversial.

“If we can’t streamline and create a common definition of what it means to be local, we need to recognize that Made in Vermont has a reputation outside of our state and that local has value within our state as we build a local and regional food system,” she said. “[The bottom line] is that we need to connect and learn from our communities and be honest and appreciative of what we each can contribute to this movement.”

The Farm to Plate initiative, for example, which focuses on increasing local food production, evolved through an intensive, comprehensive community effort. The Vermont Youth Conservation Core Farm Enrichment program, a non-profit youth, leadership, service, conservation and education organization, teaches students how to think differently about food systems and deepen their relationships with the food that they eat. Partnered with Central Vermont Medical Center and Fletcher Allen Health Care, the farm offers CSA shares to food insecure families. In the 2014 season, 200 Vermont families, over 1,000 individuals, will benefit from this program. Willard points out, however, that the “Health Care Shares program provides more than just educational opportunities for VYCC members and nutritious for needy families; it is about building community and resiliency in our food system.”

Through her talk, the audience learned about the collaboration and innovation at various geographical scales needed to create a local food market. “Clearly the work is not easy,” Willard said. “But I think it is creating change, and certainly people are better off.”