Carolina Dining Services is demonstrating its commitment to sustainable food by not only meeting its goal to offer 20 percent sustainable food in UNC dining halls, but by doing so eight years earlier than expected.
The groups leading this initiative included CDS and Fair, Local, Organic, a student group. This partnership between CDS and FLO is precisely the sort of salutary collaboration between students and administrators that this campus needs.
It’s not just the effective partnership that’s worth commending, but the outcome of that partnership.
As a result of their joint efforts, students who dine at CDS locations like Rams Head, Lenoir and some of the other on-campus dining venues will be simultaneously filling their stomachs and the pockets of members of the local economy.
At the heart of this push toward sustainable foods is a debate about what qualifies as sustainable and what does not.
FLO uses a nationally recognized calculator established by the Real Food Challenge in order to determine what qualifies as real food.
CDS, on the other hand, uses a less stringent — and problematic — metric in order to define what qualifies as local food. By this questionable calculus, Pepsi is a local food because it is bottled and processed in North Carolina.
In this debate, while there is no official definition for sustainable, both local and real foods are considered sustainable.
There are many cheaper alternatives to locally produced sustainable foods and it can, understandably, be difficult to navigate the contending concerns of cost and social responsibility.
