Day 18: Real Food at Middlebury College, and bees as roving indicators of healthy ecosystems

Last night we arrived at Middlebury College, and today we learned about their commitment to carbon neutrality by 2016, their dining services and the Real Food Challenge (RFC), and their educational campus farm. It's obvious that Middlebury students promote an activist culture, and have the potential to make serious changes if they demand it from the administration and Board of Trustees. The students were instrumental in proposing a carbon reduction goal back in 2004, and in 2006 proposed carbon neutrality by 2016. They are also involved with promoting sustainable living habits and a campus-wide energy literacy campaign.

Ross Dining Hall at Middlebury College, which serves about 

7,500 meals per day and generates over $1 million per year.

Beyond sustainability, students play a vital role in real food procurement in their dining halls. Dan Detora of Middlebury Dining Services led us through two of their dining halls, Proctor and Ross, and described their commitments to purchasing local, reducing waste, and working with the Real Food Challenge calculator. They're a self-operated facility, which means they are in control of all their sourcing and food preparation, unlike schools who contract out to companies like Sodexo, Aramark, or Bon-Appetit. From what I can tell on this trip, self-operating facilities like Middlebury and Sterling are significantly superior and tend to prioritize real food, care more about their students' preferences, and support local farmers way, way more than schools that contract out. In terms of the RFC, they currently source about 26-28% real food, and are aiming for 30% by 2016 and 50% by 2020. Those are huge aspirations, but it seems like their values and infrastructure are in place to come close to those goals. They receive deliveries from 50-60 local farms every day, as well as from Black River Produce, a VT wholesale and distribution company. It's clear that as a self-operating facility, they want to and do go beyond the national goals of the RFC.

From left: Dara Scott, Bill McKibben, Helen Youn, Kirk Webster.

Tonight we heard from a panel of four on the impact of climate change on bees and beekeeping: Bill McKibben, leading climate change activist, Kirk Webster, beekeeper who breeds disease-resistant bees, Helen Young, evolutionary biologist and professor, and Dara Scott, an Irish bee expert. Bees and beekeeping is something I had previously thought of as part of the system, but not as essential as our panelists described it. Bill talked about bees as roving indicators of the health of our plants. We don't know why the number of bees has been collapsing, but it's obviously a sign that big shifts in climate are happening and impacting our ecosystem. This is especially important because Kirk described bees as incredible adaptable creatures, but now we see extreme weather changes definitely affecting them. Dara worded the crisis quite well by saying, "I consider the bee as a sort of canary in the coal mine at this stage." The bee decline deeply affects us as humans, as according to Helen, 75% of all flowering plants rely on pollinators like bees to help them with sexual reproduction. Although the other 25% are wind pollinators, which includes plants we rely heavily on like corn and wheat, the majority of our food crops will not survive if the bees disappear, and we won't be able to rely on the animals that eat those food crops. Pollination is thus critical for human survival, and we are indirectly dependent upon bee pollinators and the health of their colonies.

This conversation was yet another indicator of the incredible interconnectivity of food systems, as well as the importance of agroecology and doing our part in maintaining healthy ecosystems.