Students Should Push For Sustainable Food

In years gone by, people were concerned about where their next meals were coming from. We at UConn enjoy the ability to walk into a dining hall or café and have a variety of food at our fingertips. Have you ever thought about where that food comes from? Probably not, and that's the problem. This easy food we take for granted is the product of environmentally degrading processes that go beyond just the destructive effects of industrial agriculture and have the backing of not only your dollars, but the dollars doled out in subsidies by Washington each year. None of this article is going to involve huge leaps in logic, so bear with me.

To figure out where food comes from, let's trace a typical lunch from South Dining Hall back to its roots. This might include a fajita chicken sandwich with lettuce and tomato on it and a glass of Coke.

Coca-Cola is perhaps the more obviously bad item of the two. Coke is delivered to the dining halls as syrup that is mixed into carbonated water by a soda fountain. The cola-flavored syrup is sweetened with high fructose corn syrup, which is not only bad for your health, but for the environment as well. The horrific amounts of corn syrup consumed by Americans each year has increased the demand for corn products in the United States. Giant corn conglomerates grow acres upon acres of corn, driving out small farmers by accepting government subsidies that drive market prices down and crush family-owned farms. These subsidies now account for 40 percent of all the profit made by large corn companies. That's your tax dollars at work. In addition, corn conglomerates grow their crop in large monoculture fields. This involves habitat destruction and soil degradation. With the soil unable to produce enough nutrients for the corn to grow, corn companies turn to fertilizers, which runoff the fields into nearby watersheds. This causes the water to have high levels of nutrients in it, leading to algae blooms like the ones we see on Mirror Lake sometimes. These blooms can choke out plants and fish from bodies of water. Industrial agriculture also uses large amounts of pesticides and herbicides - poisonous chemicals which have documented harmful effects on humans and wildlife. As if that's not enough, industrial corn production takes huge amounts of fossil fuels. All of the machinery needed to run the farms runs on oil. Plus, most industrial corn growth takes place in the Midwest. That means corn has to be shipped from there to places where it can be made into corn syrup and then shipped again to the Coca-Cola company to be made into syrup. Finally, the finished product ends up in the dining hall. All of this is driven by fossil fuels, a huge contributor to global warming. Think about that next time your pour yourself a glass of Coke with your meal.

The fajita chicken sandwich isn't much better. Dining Services gets a lot of its food delivered by national food supplier SYSCO Corp. SYSCO is based in Houston and advertises low-cost, frozen foods for restaurant and university use. Its suppliers include industrial agriculture companies, which use high-input, low-efficiency greenhouses and monoculture fields to produce the food that is shipped all over the country to countless universities and restaurants. The tomato and lettuce on the sandwich were probably grown in a greenhouse because of the season, so they are expensive both monetarily and environmentally. The power to heat greenhouses has to come from somewhere. In many instances across the West, that power comes from hydroelectric dams, which have a terrible effect on migrating fish species and other aquatic wildlife. Dams cause population fragmentation, limiting gene pools and cutting organisms off from habitats that they need to survive. Although most people don't realize it, many species of aquatic animals migrate during their lives to spawning grounds, wintering grounds, foraging grounds and many other diverse areas. Dams are essentially impenetrable obstacles for these animals. If the power comes from another source - such as fossil fuel - the damage occurs in the more publicly reprehensible form of excessive carbon emissions. But still, people continue to eat their tomatoes. The slice of chicken itself is also terrible. SYSCO describes its "SmartServe Chicken" as an alternative to real chicken breast saying, "[our] unique 3-D technology gives you the look and texture of a solid muscle chicken breast, at a fraction of the cost." That means, chicken meat is pumped into a 3-D mold and compacted into the shape of a chicken breast. That meat is shipped to SYSCO from industrial production facilities where chickens are kept in close quarters and fed growth hormones. This leads to unhealthy, unnatural birds. The amount of waste produced by these operations is also horrific. All of the 20 million chickens killed each day in this country have to defecate somewhere, and wherever that somewhere is, it leaches into watersheds, causing the same eutrophic effects that fertilizer does.

So what's the alternative? UConn ought to be supporting local farmers. Sure, we might not be able to gorge ourselves at every meal because portions would have to be controlled, but we could eat with a cleaner conscience. Supporting local food production is also good because Connecticut's farms are largely family-owned businesses that grow food in a sustainable manner. Sustainable farming also helps support keeping some of Connecticut as open space instead of allowing it to be paved over into another suburb or strip mall.

Everything comes down to this one simple fact. We all have a choice to make. Would you rather have unlimited, cheap food at a high environmental cost, or would you be willing to cut back a little to support sustainability? The responsible choice is clear.

George Maynard is a 4th-semester natural resource management and engineering major. His column appears on Thursdays and he can be reached at George.Maynard@UConn.edu.