Local Food Poster Text

From Common Energy UVic

Contents 1 Local Food Purchasing 1.1 The Question: 1.2 What We Have Learned: 1.3 What We Still Need Know:

[edit] Local Food Purchasing

[edit] The Question:

Due to the expenditure of fossil fuels during shipment and refrigeration, the consumption of distant-grown foods is a significant contributor to green-house gas emissions. Our food system disconnects consumers from the sources of their meals. This physical and psychological distance results often in uninformed and less-critical purchasing habits that allow unsustainable farming practices, and an erosion of the social and cultural benefits of food production. Shifting our food purchasing to more local sources is a first step in boosting capacity for local food production, improving food security and radically decreasing the greenhouse gases emitted during food delivery. The positive social and economic benefits of this switch will be felt throughout the region. The local purchasing project is the companion to the urban agriculture project; covering both production and consumption of necessary food.

The questions our project is trying to answer include:

• How can the University develop the local and sustainable food supply in the region?
• How can we ensure the most amount of local (and secondarily organic) food is purchased and served in all UVic food outlets?
• How can we create closer ties between the food we eat, the people who prepare it and the farmers who grow it? How do we minimize the lengths of commodity chains and build regional community?
• How can we raise awareness about the importance of purchasing local produce?

[edit] What We Have Learned:

When exploring the ways in which purchasing could support local food and our farming community, it became clear that this would be one of the most challenging aspects of creating sustainable food practices. It is difficult to find out where most of the food we consume on campus has come from; our typical food system supplies food through complicated international food distribution networks that make it extremely difficult, if not impossiblee, to determine the exact location of the grower of the food product. There are other challenges as well: local food is often more expensive (due to subsidised food production elsewhere), not available in many common processed products, consumers may be unfamiliar with local varietals, and presently, the Island does not produce a sufficient quantity of food for our population.

However, UVic has many unique opportunities and advantages as well. Most of our food outlets are directly owned by the University in one capacity or another, much of the cooking and preparation is done in-house, many chefs on campus promote local food, and there is a general willingness of people to support local farmers. The UVSP, with Foodroots Distributors Coop, has created a very successful Pocket Market, selling local produce that staff, students and faculty alike enjoy.

Actions

• Pocket Market
  • Build awareness of the market and foster a link with the Campus Community Garden. As a central hub for local food, the market offers a unique opportunity for education, project creation, and local food-related events.
• Promote opportunities for co-operative buying such as: community supported agriculture, box programs or wholesale ordering.
• Local purchasing in the Student Union Building (SUB) and the Graduate Student Society (GSS) operations.
  • Initiate the EatBC campaign, designed to encourage purchasing of food from B.C. This campaign can serve as an initial attempts at more local sourcing.
  • Work with the UVic Students Society (UVSS), GSS, local farmers, distributors, and the UVic Purchasing Department to increase local food purchasing.
• Demonstrate demand for local food through education (workshops partnered with the Campus Community Garden, as well as community groups), surveys, local specials on menus, integration with Residence Life cooking classes, and special events.
• Create a “Locavore” food guide, which will inform consumers about venues that distribute, sell, or serve local foods in the Capital Regional District

Proposals

• Shift UVic toward increased local food purchasing.
  • Support a proposal that would shift UVic towards increased purchase of local food supplies
  • Collaborate with HFCS, Purchasing and the Office of Campus Planning and Sustainability to promote local food options on campus
  • Work with regional distributors to increase local food sources
• Purchasing Policy
  • Promote the adoption of a campus sustainability management system which includes local food purchasing

We believe that this combination of actions and proposals will serve to boost local agricultural capacity, develop local food production security, and, most importantly, significantly decrease the carbon footprint of the University of Victoria community.

[edit] What We Still Need Know:

There are still many unanswered questions in successfully implementing comprehensive local purchasing strategies. Here are some that we are contemplating:

1. What will the additional costs be to greater local food purchasing? Is it possible to offset the additional costs by selecting a more seasonal menu? How can the benefits of local purchasing be appropriately quantified taking into account other aspects of food besides simply price (eg. produce that is harvested closer to ripeness has greater nutritional value)?
2. How can we create supply that will fit the high demand and consistency that UVic food services require? (We are trying to address this at least in parts in our Urban Agriculture project)
3. How can 'local' be best defined for a purchasing policy, allowing the policy to be flexible to the universities needs (eg. quantities) while still accomplishing its goals of reduction of GHG emissions and supporting our local food system?
4. How can we impliment a better food traceability system?
5. How can we better engage people into local food purchasing? (Especially those important to making it successful such as purchasers and chefs)

According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization report Livestock's Long Shadow, and other recent scientific reports, livestock and meat production contribute almost one-fifth of greenhouse gases, perhaps more than all of transport combined. Livestock/meat play a role in climate change mainly through: (1) deforestation. Much of deforestation is ultimately for making steak etc. (land for grazing and for feedcrops such as soya); (2) gas production. The methane and nitrous oxide, from the animals and their manure, are more potent greenhouse gases than is CO2. How then can we work to limit the amount of meat consumed on-campus? How can shift what meat consumption there is, to more climate-friendly meat sources?