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Posted October 12, 2006: The University
of Toronto (U of T) has shot into the world lead of universities
supporting the relationships and infrastructure for a local
food system.
The mid-September launch of the new program to introduce
local and sustainably-produced food to cafeterias and eateries
serving its 70,000 students is “the major new crop of
relationships that’s being harvested today,” prominent
radio broadcaster Mary Wiens told over 200 well-wishers gathered
at Hart House Circle for speeches and food samples. This commitment
to Ontario farmers “is an excellent example of how a
university can get involved as a good neighbor,” U of
T provost and vice-president Vivek Goel said.
The U of T deal is not a first. About 200 campuses across
North America, including such big Ivy League names as Yale
and Vassar, already have some kind of farm-to-college program.
Students on about 60 campuses around the continent enjoy food
grown by fellow students on their own learning grounds.
But the U of T deal puts farm-to-school connections on a
whole new scale. It brings together eaters at the largest
university on the continent with farmers in North America’s
largest—at 725,000 hectares (556,000 acres)—protected
peri-urban greenbelt of prime farmland. It pairs two old words—local
and sustainable—into a new phrase for the latest food
trend. And it lets an emerging economic superpower show its
stuff.
The U of T’s new farmers aren’t just local. They
also follow sustainable practices. Get used to those two formerly
distinct words—local and sustainable—rolling off
your tongue together. It will soon have the same mouth feel
as macaroni and cheese, research and development, theory and
practice, health and well-being, equity and diversity, peanut
butter and jelly. In this age of convergence, policy innovation
more often than not consists of coupling something old, something
new, something borrowed and something blue.
“Local and sustainable” now
a brand
Local and sustainable is the new kid on the food block, edging
up against the supermarket and junk food juggernaut of distant
and unsustainable, as well as growing market segments that
might be described as distant and organic (organic strawberries
from across the continent, for instance) and local but not
particularly sustainable (local eggs from factory barns, for
example).
Local Flavour Plus (www.localflavourplus.ca),
which helped set the rules for the deal between U of T and
its food service companies, gives its okay to farmers who’ve
met the most comprehensive standards in the world for sustainability.
Local Flavour Plus-certified farmers are local producers who
follow practices ensuring low pesticide use, no use of genetically-engineered
materials, high conservation of energy and biodiversity, and
careful measures of animal and farmworker welfare. Such standards
go beyond organic, which regulates a strict ban on certain
farm inputs (synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and so on),
but doesn’t address factors as such as the distance
food travels, packaging around the food or labor standards.
The U of T deal is the first world-class trial of this comprehensive
approach to labeling the new food category—local and
sustainable. (I would quote Lori Stahlbrand, the president
of Local Flavour Plus, on such matters, but this would raise
questions as to my objectivity, since I am her husband.)
This food program might just be a warm-up exercise for the
emerging economic and environmental heft of universities.
Post-secondary institutions constitute about 10,000 points
of light across North America, with unmatched purchasing power—if
US universities were a country, they would be the 21st biggest
economy in the world, while in Canada, university R&D
[Research and Development] contributes more to the GNP [Gross
National Product] than the pulp and paper or auto industries—that
could set the standard for wages in medium-sized cities, energy-efficient
buildings and equipment, lifecycle resource (aka waste) management,
alternative transportation, edgy Latin Quarters and local,
sustainable food for miles around. They could also ground
teaching and research in experiential on-the-ground learning
that helps students base their lifeplans on a strong sense
of personal agency that links education and life energy—words
that belong together as much as theory and practice or local
and sustainable.
Opportunities for exercising and sharing this new species
of soft and hard power inspire a bracing new book, Planet
U: Sustaining the World, Reinventing the University,
by Michael M’Gonigle and Justine Stark. Wedging their
experiences at the University of Victoria in British Columbia
onto international trendlines, their scenarios far surpass
anything that was entertained by student radicals of the 1960s
(mea culpa) in terms of a “red university.” Their
“green university” is about uplifting and transforming
both the educational process, and what they call the “shadow
curriculum” of acceptable operational practices in respected
institutions in the business of preparing for the future.
Engines for global sustainability?
By fostering new values and businesses, they write, university-based
change “would not entail an old-fashioned revolution
of one class against another, but a gradual transition by
people in place against an inherited structure of spatial
dependency. In this way, the challenge of global sustainability
is unlike any social struggle of the past.”
I never expected that a university would ever use its purchasing
power and prestige to put local and sustainable food on the
map, which only goes to show you how easy it is to slip into
bad thinking habits. Many of us are used to thinking about
the world as controlled by “them,” and the glass
of power being at least half-empty rather than at least partly
filled.
Power corrupts, but absolute powerlessness corrupts absolutely,
the old saying should go, because we too often miss the opportunities
and responsibilities of exercising power in a fluid and multi-polar
world, where power is often absent because of lack of empowerment,
a casualty of the “use it or lose it” syndrome.
How many Torontonians imagine their city to be a centre of
higher education, with 200,000 post-secondary students, about
10 percent of the population? There’s barely a student
ghetto or quarters in town, let alone other signatures of
its demographic, social, economic and environmental potential.
So universities get stuck as centres of higher earning, rather
than higher learning.
The ivory tower wields a lot of power, much of it subject
to the direct pressure of students, staff and alumni, as well
as the indirect pressures of government financiers and public
opinion. As the boiler room of a knowledge—and innovation-centred
economy—there’s a reason why major corporations
strive to sponsor, influence and frame what goes on in the
halls of academe—universities belong in the ranks of
the heavy lifters.
Bon Appetit. 
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