The challenge facing local food
Food service giants like Sodexho, Aramark and BAMCO are jumping on the "eat local" bandwagon. Will the corporate attention give a boost to sustainable agriculture, or defuse the grassroots revolution?
By John Feffer
Read more: Life, Eat and Drink, Food and Travel
Jan. 18, 2007 | On Oct. 3, with the fall semester in full swing, the dining hall at Georgetown Law School was packed with students slumped over bookbags and laptops. Squeezed among their plates and papers were tabletop displays announcing that the day's meal was part of an "Eat Local Challenge" that required the school's chef to create a meal of ingredients entirely grown or raised within 150 miles of his kitchen. Between bites, the future lawyers peered at the signs with a mix of curiosity and indignation. Reducing food-shipping miles and supporting small farms were all good and fine -- but what ever happened to Taco Tuesday?
Though it's been 20 years since graduation, I can still recall my alma mater's grim fare: the tetrazzinis, the iceberg lettuce, the gluey stews. I remember how my fellow students clamored for more vegetarian dishes -- or more anything that just plain tasted better. The garlic roasted chicken and sautéed greens served up at Georgetown Law would have blown our minds and our taste buds. But the students I met there spoke longingly of packaged sandwiches and tacos filled with greasy, industrial-strength hamburger meat -- while the food service staff sounded like gourmet revolutionaries. I wondered: What kind of culinary looking-glass universe had I fallen into?
Georgetown's Eat Local Challenge -- and the temporary disappearance of Taco Tuesday -- was the brainchild of the Palo Alto, Calif.-based Bon Appétit Management Co. With a national staff of 10,000 and annual revenues of $400 million, BAMCO runs 300 cafes in colleges like Georgetown Law, at the corporate campuses of Oracle and Yahoo, and at other posh locations including the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and the Getty Villa in Malibu, Calif. Yes, that's cafes, not cafeterias, as BAMCO's director of communications, Maisie Ganzler, is quick to stress. "Cafeteria" conjures up images of can openers, frozen veggies and great quantities of mystery meat. But BAMCO believes even lowly college mess halls can be brought into the culinary vanguard.
BAMCO is not alone. In the past year, the "local" ethos has overtaken even organics as the gourmet cause célèbre -- And eat-local challenges have begun sprouting up all over the place. Large food service providers like Sodexho and Aramark, having already introduced organic products, are now experimenting with local sourcing. At Yale, Stanford, Berkeley and other universities, students can eat meals prepared with fresh local produce grown on or just off campus.
The eat-local movement owes no small measure of its success to recent exposés of the organic industry. As huge corporate farms have moved into the sector, the media has been abuzz with the transformation of organics into business as usual -- with Whole Foods catering to the upscale consumer and Wal-Mart aiming for the fat middle demographic. The question is: will big business's discovery of "local" food eventually undercut the positive effects the movement may have on the environment, small farmers and taste? Advocates of eating local say no. Their singular hope is to foment a revolution that starts on the farm and ends on our plates.
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BAMCO's annual Eat Local Challenge debuted only two years ago, but the company has long made local food a priority. Since its founding in 1987, the food service company has attempted to marry sustainability with profitability. "We weren't founded as a health food company," Ganzler explains. "And as we've made more decisions about sustainability, we've always considered the bottom line." BAMCO's Farm to Fork program, which connects small local producers to the cafe chefs, guarantees that an average 20 percent of sourcing for all meals must be local. "But that's not the upper limit," Ganzler says. "Some accounts go up to 70 or 80 percent during harvest season."
On the wall of the Georgetown Law School cafe is a placard devoted to BAMCO's Circle of Responsibility. It stresses the use of organic products, cage-free eggs, humanely raised meat and low-fat ingredients. The list even gets down to the nitty-gritty of stocks from scratch, fresh-squeezed lemon juice and mashed potatoes from real potatoes. The trifold brochures available beneath the placard read like the demands of a student protest movement rather than a multimillion-dollar company. The community brochure speaks of "boycotting purveyors that do not support farmworkers' rights in regards to working and living conditions." The environment brochure emphasizes fair trade coffee and decries net-pen fish farming, and the nutrition brochure challenges the claims of high-protein diets.
At the Georgetown challenge, however, few students had bothered to read any of the materials. "Those of us who are foodies don't eat here," admitted third-year law student Morgan Lynn. She dropped in that day for a juice and decided to stay for the Eat Local lunch, which she and a friend declared tasty but a little on the greasy and salty side. Lynn shops at a food co-op and prepares meals at home. The students who do frequent the cafe, still harboring a grudge over Taco Tuesday, are a tough crowd that is quick to criticize. Most days, chef Horne and his kitchen crew are like stand-up comics stuck with an audience of drunken hecklers.
But for the 800 students at Albertson College, just 25 miles outside Boise, Idaho, BAMCO is the best thing going. This year, the Eat Local Challenge surrounded students with local food. Beth Delmar, the general manager of the Albertson cafe, estimates that its food was 95 percent local that day -- with local beef short ribs in plum sauce, sustainably farmed trout with cherry tomato and cilantro salsa, and even some unusual ground cherries for the salad bar. Delmar's baker also runs an orchard, so comes to work every morning with fresh apples, plums, pears and pluots for pies and breads. But here, too, except for the environmental studies students -- and the discerning faculty -- her clientele has been slow to embrace the core concept of eating local, many still hung up on the ugliness of heirloom tomatoes.
Google and YouTube might have struck their recent deal at a Denny's, but it's a different scene at BAMCO's five cafes at the Yahoo corporate headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif. The folks at Yahoo take their food very seriously. Executive chef Bob Hart designs menus for the five employee cafes at Yahoo, plus the executive meals and the occasional business meeting. Northern California has local products year-round, and the Yahoo cafes serve an older crowd whose interest in the origins of their food is already primed. Breakfast for the Eat Local Challenge day was two eggs, duck confit and fingerling potatoes roasted in thyme, duck fat and kosher salt from the San Francisco Bay.
Whatever the sophistication level of their audience, the BAMCO chefs clearly enjoy the Eat Local Challenge. Far from rebelling against the sourcing requirements, they relish the way the restrictions spur their creativity. At Georgetown Law, for instance, chef Horne solved the black pepper problem -- there are no tropical microclimates conducive to growing Piper nigrum in the D.C. area -- by adding baby arugula to his sautéed greens to give them a kick. At the Yahoo cafe, for a thickener, Hart used boiled Italian butter beans in place of cornstarch and substituted blackberry compote for cranberries with his roast turkey. Michael Anderson, the chef at the Eckerd College cafe in St. Petersburg, Fla., solved his protein challenge by devising a citrus-marinated alligator salad (though less adventurous carnivores could take refuge in smoked chicken, organic beef burgers or Florida shrimp).
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