Campus Gets a Taste of “Real Food”

By Kristen Thompson ’18

Although there would need to be more than one ripe at a time, strawberries grown on Marlboro’s community farm could go toward the college’s “real food” quota.

In April 2014 former president Ellen McCulloch-Lovell and Benjamin Newcomb, then Marlboro’s chef manager, signed the Real Food Campus Commitment, making Marlboro’s dining services the first branch of Metz Culinary Management to take on the challenge (see Potash Hill, Fall 2014). Since then, the real struggle has been trying to meet the 20 percent “real food” quota by 2020.

The Real Food Challenge (RFC) is a national program with the goal of directing more than $1 billion of university money spent on food toward food that is “real” (ethically, locally, and/or healthily produced). Since signing on in 2014, Marlboro College has made strides in sourcing food from companies that treat their livestock better and give their employees fair wages and safe working conditions. This fall semester chemistry professor Todd Smith is introducing Searching for Food Justice, a class geared directly toward assessing the college’s food purchases based on “real food” criteria. But there are still challenges.

“We’ve established curricular support and have a working team in place within a committee on campus, but more work is needed to identify peer leaders and support their involvement with the RFC,” says Ben, now food services manager. “The new guidelines and criteria were recently updated; it’s time to launch the calculator and start using our updated Real Food Policy as part of that effort.”

Marlboro’s beverages exemplify the college’s efforts to invest in fair food. The dining hall and Potash Grill buy all of their coffee from Mocha Joe’s, which works directly with communities in Cameroon where coffee is grown. They pay the people working there fairly, and money goes back into the local communities, in some cases contributing to the building of churches and schools. Black River Produce is one of Marlboro’s key sources for humanely raised meat with neither hormones nor antibiotics, from the grass-fed burgers in the grill to the local bacon, and even some of the chicken served on campus.

“The dining staff are beginning work on a special local farm-to-table menu to facilitate more real, local, sustainable food than ever despite our budgetary challenges,” says Ben. “We recently rejoined Windham Farm and Food, sourcing 100 percent real food daily from over 84 hyper local farms with an aggregation and delivery service. The farmers are marketing directly to us, greatly improving our access to locally grown and produced items for our menus.”

Despite these significant gains, community involvement remains challenging—it has been difficult to make the Real Food Challenge enticing with so many other academic and extracurricular projects pursued by such a small school population. While efforts were made throughout the last spring semester to encourage students to get involved, the bulk of the work fell to a few individuals.

“In order to make the Real Food Challenge stronger on campus, we need more education for all involved,” says Brian Newcomb, Potash Grill manager. He asserts that if more of the Marlboro community knows about the Real Food Challenge, they may be able to point the kitchen staff to other “real” food sources. “The more they know, the more they can speak up. The more they speak up, the more we can instill change.”