This is part three of three in the series, Assessing Aramark.
Nick Brown is the head of the ASU Sustainable Food Task Force, a group of administrators, professors and students charged with the task of “developing an institutional food policy that expresses the priorities of students, faculty and staff,” according to the group’s statement of values.
Task Force member and sustainability professor Chris Wharton said sustainability in food is difficult to define, which makes coming to a consensus on the task force difficult. He said he ultimately believes food should be sourced from responsible parties.
“Aramark and the other providers are keen on doing that,” he said, “or at least matching the values that ASU would espouse in relation to this.”
Wharton said it would be nice from an educational standpoint to walk into a dining hall on any given day and say what amount of food is procured locally and have stories about the local farms and producers who supply the food to Aramark.
“It works very well in Aramark’s flagship location in the MU, Engrained,” he said. “I think we could be doing that elsewhere, but it would just require that the food service providers have that information on hand and be able to quantify it to some extent.”
Quantifying Sustainability
Nick Brown said the task force is studying the results of a survey of about 400 students and faculty from across a range of disciplines. The task force hopes to use the results of to identify what the University community values most in its purchasing decisions and make suggestions to Aramark.
In the survey, students were asked to rank the following food values: nutrition, locally produced, social justice, ethical treatment of farm animals, organic, low carbon and cost.
The results clearly show that students value cost and nutrition above all, but of the 400 people who took the survey, 250 did so online, and were not able to see the definitions for each value, Brown said. Meanwhile, Brown said those who took the survey in person only received definitions if they asked.
Task Force member and director of the Real Food ASU organization Peter Goldman said the top two responses being nutrition and cost came as no surprise and said he was disappointed that the other values like local, organic and humane were not articulated more thoroughly.
Goldman, a second year urban and environmental planning master’s student, said he is working to provide a more thorough survey, in which he would phrase the questions more succinctly in an attempt to get more meaningful answers.
David Schwartz, campaign director for the national chapter of Real Food Challenge, said transparency in the food procurement process at universities is both essential and appropriate, especially considering many students are required to purchase meal plans.
Schwartz said the high degree of secrecy around Aramark’s food sourcing is frustrating for students, because they don’t get the chance to know what they are putting in their bodies.
He said Aramark must face up to a moral imperative, because it is “funneling millions, if not hundreds of millions, of dollars a year into some of the most exploitative, unsustainable operations.”
He said other schools that contract with Aramark have had success using the real food calculator, a tool operated by students to help them quantify how much of the food on campus is actually sustainable.
According to its website, the RFC guidelines for real sustainable foods are those that are local and community-based, fair, ecologically sound and humane.
He said of the three largest food service providers, Aramark, Sodexo and Compass, Aramark is the only one that has yet to commit to transparency agreements and has done the least in terms of moving toward making more sustainable purchasing agreements.
The Real Food Challenge and ASU have overlapping priorities, Brown said. But, ASU participates in the Sustainability Tracking Assessment and Rating System of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, which scores its progress in many areas of sustainability performance.
“The Real Food Challenge rating system does not meet our needs,” Brown said.
STARS is a voluntary self-assessment program that universities can complete to measure their sustainability metrics in many areas, said Jillian Buckholz, senior programs coordinator at AASHE.
According to its website, the food purchasing guidelines for STARS are any food or beverage which is produced or processed within 250 miles; anything that is third-party certified organic; marine stewardship council blue eco label, food alliance or fair trade; and anything grown on a farm that operates as a cooperative, has a profit sharing policy for all employees, or has a social responsibility policy covering the following for all workers: union or prevailing wages, transportation and/or housing support and/or health care benefits.
Shannon Jenkins, an officer for Real Food ASU, finds this reporting mechanism problematic, because it is self-reporting.
She said the real food calculator is a concrete, uniform way to determine these metrics while allowing students to participate in the process.
“But somebody needs to police (Aramark), and it should definitely be someone's job to make sure that they're being transparent,” Jenkins said. “If ASU has a contract with them, then it should be someone within the large ASU bureaucracy managing that.”
Brandi Heatherly said synthesizing the sourcing data to give to ASU for calculation is not an easy process, and there is much thorough analysis involved.
“It’s not just a magical printout that says, ‘Here is a list of everything,’” she said. “It’s a very diligent process from our group.”
She said the data is given to ASU, which uses it to self-reporting to the STARS system, and if “they want to share that information, they can.”
Riley said in an email, “If they did provide it to anyone at the University, it would have been done under a nondisclosure agreement. No such data was provided to me.”
The Future
Sustainability scientist and founder of the Urban Farm in Phoenix, Greg Peterson said the notion of sustainability is not an absolute.
Peterson said although he does not have an opinion on whether contracting the food sourcing out to Aramark is a good or a bad idea, he does know that nurturing the local food economy by integrating it with the University will help it be more sustainable.
“…As far as I can tell, when we define sustainability, and look at sustainable food systems, our corporate food model is not sustainable,” he said.
Peter Goldman said the responsibility to become a more sustainable in food procurement is multi-faceted, but ultimately, Aramark is waiting for the University to establish what it expects from it as a provider, because “sustainability to corporations means sustainable profits.”
“I think it’s a multi-layered problem,” he said. “There is no external or internal leader on ASUs administration side or student side to really put the pressure on the University and Aramark to get this going.”
He said his goal is to set up a food forum by the end of this semester, so that by fall 2013, students, administrators and food service providers can interact to figure out the best options for sustainability in food.
“But, if administration and Aramark aren’t playing ball with it,” he said, “then the next responsible step would probably be get enough petitions together and maybe go through Undergraduate Student Government to say, ‘We want to help set the terms for this change.’”
Reach the reporter at npmendo@asu.edu or follow him @NPMendoza
Part I — Business as usual
Part II — The grass is always greener
