College students’ seemingly insatiable appetite for terrible foods is as notorious as their enthusiasm for sleeping in. They devour Ramen Noodles, cereal and cold pizza in volumes that could kill the average adult, often washing it down with oceans of lukewarm beer.
Yet at Fort Lewis College, students have called for – and gotten – a “real-food” revolution.
FLC is now the second college in the state to commit to the Real Food Challenge, meaning FLC’s Environmental Center, administration and on-campus food-service provider Sodexo are promising to allocate 20 percent of their food-purchasing dollars to buying from fair, humanely sourced, ecologically sound and local businesses.
The real-food pledge came after a resounding student body vote, said Rachel Landis, director of FLC’s Environmental Center. In a 2012 survey, 76 percent of the student body identified moving to more sustainable food options as their highest environmental priority.
To celebrate the milestone, hundreds of hungry students formed a serpentine if swiftly moving line Tuesday outside the San Juan Dining Hall ready to feast on real food: carrots, broccoli, beef, chicken and delicious, locally produced ice cream.
Landis said FLC was ideally situated to make a difference: The college’s dining hall feeds thousands of bellies, and college students’ diets inform eating habits that will last a lifetime.
Landis said students’ passion for environmentalism is deep. “We’re super excited about this,” she said.
The challenge is a national campaign that aims to shift $1 billion of institutional spending toward real food by 2020, meaning more colleges need to follow FLC’s lead.
The challenge’s director, David Schwartz, who gave the inaugural address at FLC’s Real Food Chow Down on Tuesday, said real food isn’t limited to organic, locally grown food – which is the political focus of Durango’s burgeoning food movement – though organic and locally grown are major components of what makes foods “real.”
He said a real-food economy isn’t limited to locally grown produce; he loves bananas, which would be hard to grow in Colorado’s arid climate.
“A real food economy should include bananas – but bananas that are grown in an environmentally sound way, by growers and pickers who were paid fairly for their work,” Schwartz said.
Today, he said, society places abysmal value on food work. Nationally, food workers are among the lowest paid in the entire economy, despite occupying millions of jobs.
“Obviously, the climate of southwestern Colorado is different from food systems that resemble those of California or Vermont, said Cara Greene, who works for Real Food Challenge in Fort Collins. But we have a lot here, and the agricultural traditions in this region are very rich, and they run very deep in this particular landscape.”
Schwartz said he and Greene had been in Durango for five days, touring local farms and restaurants.
“There’s a lot of potential from what I’ve seen here,” he said. “Whether it’s incubator farms or farm-to-school efforts, there are any number of things happening, including at restaurants around the area.
“It seems like over the next five years you are going to see a lot of really cool things happen,” he said.
cmcallister@durangoherald.com
