The evasiveness of Columbia Dining about its food sources.
By Phoebe Wagner
Last year, Hewitt’s “Activism Is About the Journey” mural and the televisions that play simultaneous Bob Ross and MasterChef videos gained some new friends: two large glass cases filled with plants in terracotta pots. Purchased from Brooklyn-based startup Farmshelf, these cases add a cyber-farm aesthetic to Hewitt’s decor. Another television on the opposite wall plays a never-ending loop of Farmshelf ads, time-lapsed baby greens sprouting again and again. In theory, the Farmshelves supply fresh greens to the Hewitt kitchen, their soil and plants monitored by a Farmshelf-exclusive app. However, the cases are often populated by overgrown, wilted plants, usually garnishes and herbs.
In the past two decades, as college ranking metrics like those of U.S. News, Forbes, and The Princeton Review have begun including lists of the most sustainable campuses, colleges and universities face pressure to advance their sustainability measures. Many colleges—including Columbia and Barnard—have established Offices of Sustainability and hired sustainability coordinators and directors. Initiatives like Farmshelf enhance the visibility of sustainable agriculture on campus, but they come at a cost: Barnard Dining paid a sticker price of $9,900 (plus a $109 monthly subscription for the app) for two shiny but seldom used e-agriculture cases. It would be cheaper to buy the herbs from local farmers. I’ve come to see Farmshelf as nothing more than a pretty face; it might produce a few basil leaves each week, but its contribution to Hewitt is mainly aesthetic.
Like the flashy Farmshelf boxes, Columbia and Barnard’s respective food-sourcing websites construct a sustainable persona for their dining halls. Each website lists five to 10 farms with refreshingly quaint names like Mountain Sweet Berry Farm and Old Maid’s Farm. A Google search of these farms led me to charming websites that tell stories of small-scale family farming. However, there are no statistics showing how much produce actually comes from each of Columbia’s partner farms, and such small-scale farms would be incapable of supplying more than a small proportion of Columbia’s total food supply. One of the farms closed in 2023, though it is still listed on the website as a partner. These farms are the poster children of sustainable dining, and all other farms are absent: Columbia lists no factory farms and no farms outside of New York or Connecticut. At a glance, Columbia Dining is clean, green, and aloof.
Curious to see what local farmers might have to say about this, I paid a visit to the Columbia Greenmarket, hosted weekly on Thursdays and Sundays. My questions proved unanswerable: I learned from the employees operating the stalls that they are New York City residents who got their jobs on Facebook. Most have visited the farms that employ them once or (more commonly) not at all. Even at the farmers’ market, I couldn’t find any farmers.
Growing up, I knew where almost everything I ate came from. My parents are small-scale farmers. (We have a website that isn’t so different from those of Columbia’s partner farms.) I regularly ate dinners made from ingredients I had helped harvest earlier that day. Some of my earliest memories are of helping bring produce to market every Wednesday after school, where I would chat with our customers and play games with their kids. My childhood meals and social life orbited around farming.
Now that that immediacy is gone, I find myself feeling both far from home and full of wonder at the food around me. Big piles of strawberries at Ferris: Where did they come from, who grew them, and how did they get here? They may have come from one of the palatable farms on the website, or they may have come from thousands of miles away. Perhaps the Farmshelf aims to ease this feeling of disconnect by giving students a glimpse of food production, but it is too artificial and ill-kept to succeed.
Even if Columbia aims to create a sustainable campus and invest in local produce, the odds are stacked against them. The U.S. farm industry is becoming increasingly reliant on mega-farms, and there simply are not enough small-scale farms to support food needs: Only 18% of U.S. food production in 2021 came from small farms, according to the USDA. Columbia seems to think that obscuring this reality is the best way to promote a sustainable image. However, I’m sure that I'm not the only student hungry—literally—for a connection to the food I consume. Columbia could feature more mid-sized partner farms, which are sustainable alternatives to factory farming, even if their websites are less aesthetically pleasing. They could invite student participation and feedback in food sourcing. By letting go of its manicured veneer of sustainability, Columbia could foster something far more valuable: student knowledge, curiosity, and excitement about food production.
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