Tufts’ food policies are not as eco-friendly as the university claims they are. As students, we have access to one of the nation’s top college dining services, but we still see substantial room for improvement. We are concerned with ways in which Tufts could improve Dining Services in order to reduce its food waste, improve its transparency, and support environmentally just food sources.
We aim to lay out the lack of transparency with Tufts’ handling of food distribution and sourcing, in order to raise consciousness and encourage more sustainable and just dietary habits. Why is it important to focus in on the food Tufts brings to campus? These purchases have large repercussions that can be explained by the social movement towards food justice. Food justice describes the fundamental human right to eat, buy, and sell fresh, local, healthy foods. In a situation of food justice, all people have access to food that nourishes them and is culturally appropriate.
Food justice is a concept and movement that has developed as a response to the realities of food injustice present in the world. The current global food system operates upon systems of oppression that rely on economically-disruptive exports and imports, mass production of food, and low wage labor. Most of Tufts’ dining options are complicit in this system of oppression. In this way, the mainstream rhetoric of “sustainable food” falls short – we must factor in social, economic, cultural fairness, justice, and sustainability; not just the notion of organics or food miles in a social vacuum.
Absent from discourse about composting and going trayless is a discussion about the source of the food in the dining halls. Often, Tufts students believe they are reaching for a healthier option when they pick up a banana on their way out of the dining halls. That banana traveled thousands of miles to campus; the vessels that transported it and thousands others of its kind created a huge carbon footprint. It was subjected to unhealthy doses of pesticides, endangering the workers and growers of bananas. And because the food grown in the globe’s agricultural areas is often exported en masse to “developed” nations like the United States, the food of the people who live in agricultural zones often must be imported, because those populations are priced out of their indigenous harvests. This forced dependence on imports is an affront to food sovereignty, a notion meaning that individuals should have the right to define their own food choices and systems according to culture and custom.
This is just one example of how “fresh and healthy” food options for students and campus community members, do not necessarily mean food options that support food justice.
In light of these issues about food sourcing, Tufts’ claims of “greenness” and sustainability seem contradictory or insufficient. Talking about food sustainability by citing purchases of cage-free eggs and organic products on the Dining Services web page’s “Environmentally & Socially Responsible Programs” section is not working toward food justice. It is instead misleading advertising—it is greenwashing. This term, coined by Lynn Kahle, refers to “a form of spin in which green PR or green marketing is deceptively used to promote the perception that an organization's products, aims or policies are environmentally friendly.”
Tufts greenwashes through its persistent language of food sustainability while omitting any language of actual environmental justice. Tufts’ language about sustainable food services is relevant and important in some ways, but also leaves one to believe that there is no more work to be done, thus perpetuating complacency when it comes to how food justice is related to environmental justice on this campus. Improving recycling and removing trays to save water and cut down on food waste are steps in the right direction, but they are not enough – we need to be conscious about how certain people and lands are exploited in the food industry, while we, as privileged food consumers, benefit from that exploitation. We need to think critically about what actions we can take to change that.
Tufts does host an option for students to buy and access local foods that support local farmers, but it is short-lived and is barely advertised--outside of the continued attempt to greenwash Tufts. The Tufts Farmer’s Market sells food every Wednesday for the month between early September and October as long as weather permits. This is a good option to check out during that month, but this program should be more highly advertised and should be brought back in the spring semester.
If you want to learn more and get involved with food justice issues at Tufts University, check out these on-campus groups and clubs: Tufts Food for Thought, Tufts Veg Society, Tufts Culinary Society, Real Food Challenge, Tom Thumb’s Garden, Tufts Food Rescue, Tufts Sustainability Collective, and Tufts Eco-Representatives.
For more information, literature, and art on the issues explained above, check out a few of these sources:
In Organic We Trust (film)
Food, Inc. (film)
“Apple” (poem by Roger Sedarat)
Dewick-MacPhie Dining Hall on Tufts Medford Campus
Source: http://www.besthospitalitydegrees.com/25-universities-with-the-healthiest-and-freshest-food/
“Canola Queasy” by Rita Wong
“In April 1997, Monsanto pulled two varieties of genetically engineered canola seeds from the Canadian market after testing revealed that at least one of the patented herbicide-tolerant transgenic varieties contained an ‘unexpected’ gene. This was after 60,000 bags of the seeds had already been sold throughout Western Canada.” – Mae-Wan Ho
vulture capital hovers over our dinner tables, covers hospitals alurid shade of canola, what gradient decline in the stuck market, what terminal severity in that twenty-year monopoly culled the patent regime, its refrain of greed, false prophets hawk hydrophobic that is oily platitudes to justify rapacity as they engineer despair in those brilliant but foolish yellow genetically stacked prairie crops. refrain from greed, i want to advise them, but how to converse with the wilfully profitable stuck in their monetary monologue? head-on collisions create more energy but who gets obliterated? despite misgivings i blurt, don’t shoot the messy angels with your cell-arranging blasts, don’t document their properties in order to pimp them. the time for business-as-usual is over. it died with the first colonial casualty. stop the clock. hey bloated monstrosity: transcribe your ethics first or your protein mass shall turn protean mess and be auctioned off in the stacked market and so you shall endlessly reap your cussed stunts.
(dedicated to Percy Schmeiser, the Saskatchewan farmer who was threatened and sued by Monsanto because genetically engineered canola happened to blow into his fields)
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