Opinion: CDS and FLO Food are advancing mutual goals

Carolina Dining Services is practicing what it preaches about sustainability. Its actions provide a refreshing break from usually unresponsive bureaucratic models on campus.

But as this board wrote last year, CDS has strides to make.

Last year’s Feeding the 5,000 was a leap in the right direction. The event highlighted the detrimental local consequences of the global food waste issue by involving the entire campus community in a free meal.

Fair, Local, Organic Food has and continues to lead the effort toward an effective balance between criticism and collaboration with CDS. The result is furthering its stated goal of informing students about the food system and creating a better food economy at UNC.

Claire Hannapel, of FLO Food, gave CDS well-deserved praise for their focus on sustainability.

The progress we are excited to see is brought about in the same way as many activist and issue-based groups on campus —with a mix of advocacy, collaboration and protest.

FLO Food and CDS aren’t on either end of a spectrum. The nature of their relationship is complicated, and shouldn’t be defined with an “us vs. them” mentality.

FLO Food cannot single-handedly alter students’ sense of responsibility for the waste they create. If not for environmental reasons — wasting more means creating more harmful emissions.

More waste also means more food to be purchased and more energy to heat or cool it. Both of those inputs are positively related to the cost of a swipe. If we waste less, we can spend less too.

At the same time, costs prevent CDS and other entities on campus from making meaningful progress in all kinds of sectors. The cost of meat from humanely-raised pigs is typically higher than meat from pigs raised in factory-like settings, a difficult reality of our removed-from-nature food system.

Brandon Thomas is a spokesman for Auxillary Services, CDS’ parent department at UNC. He noted that nearly 10 percent of animal products served in the dining hall are humanely sourced. By wasting less, CDS can afford to diversify its offering of these benevolent products.

Sustainable practices are worth the cost, given CDS’ role as a campus educator and advocate.

“We think dining halls have huge purchasing power in changing how our food system is designed,” said Hannapel.

CDS deserves both the praise and criticism it receives. It would do well to continue listening to both.