The Real Food Challenge

Jason Mark, editor of Earth Island Journal and a founding member of an urban cooperative farm, is a columnist for Change.org.

At some point in your life you’ve probably had to eat off a tray. Maybe it was in high school, where you were forced to brave the microwaved cafeteria slop. Or in college, where even if the dining hall boasted a decent variety of choices — pizza, pastas, stir-fries, salad bar — the food wasn’t anything to write home to Mom about. Perhaps, God forbid, you’ve eaten at a hospital dining room. Any of those places would have taught you one of the immutable laws of the universe: Institutional food is, at best, bland; at worst, simply awful. One of the main causes for this is that dining hall food isn’t fresh. More often than not, it comes out of a Sysco can.

The Real Food Challenge is trying to change that. The RFC, as its member-activists call it, has set its sights on a simple goal — improving the quality of the food offered to students at colleges and high schools. Organized by The Food Project in Boston and the California Student Sustainability Coalition, the Challenge has attracted the energy of students at 330 schools across the United States. Challenge participants are demanding that their dining services commit to serving “real food” — that is, food that is local and community based, fair to workers and growers, ecologically sound, and humane to animals.

The force of this movement was on display over President’s Day weekend, when students from across the West Coast gathered in Santa Cruz, CA, to scheme about how to grow the Real Food Challenge.

Organizers of the third-annual conference said they were blown away by the attendance. Last year, 125 students participated in the convergence. This year, organizers were expecting about 150 students; 200 showed up.

I got a little taste of what the convergence was like when I spoke with RFC campaigner Hai Vo earlier this week. “It’s growing, in numbers and consciousness,” he told me. “There really is a surge of college and high school students.”

Vo is an all-star among Real Food Challenge activists. As a student at UC-Irvine, Vo — working with other students, faculty, administrators and dining service workers — organized a comprehensive study of how the campus’s cafeteria food is sourced, processed-cooked, and served. He then hooked up with other campus food reformers to establish a nationwide goal to get colleges and universities to be serving 20 percent real food by 2020.

The RFC is well on the way to fulfilling that goal. So far, some of the most impressive accomplishments have occurred within the massive, 10-campus University of California system. An estimated 18 percent of the food at UC-Berkeley meets the “real” criteria, and the campus’s dining halls boast organic-certified salad bars. UC-Irvine serves about 10 percent real food, while UC-Santa Cruz has already beat the goal and is serving about 25 percent real food.

“In total, I think we are going to get there in 10 years,” said Vo, who thrums with enough energy to run a farm single-handedly.

By Vo’s telling, the Real Food convergence sounded like your typical student conference. Interspersed among the panels and workshops and brainstorms there were dance parties, songs, and the obligatory drum circle. What distinguished the convergence from past RFC conferences was its clear focus on solutions. I’ve spoken at a number of student activist gatherings, and there’s usually a fair amount of The Issues 101; just because many students are new to social change efforts, they often need some time to learn more about the topics they are passionate for.

Not the RFC organizers — these kids have done their homework. They’re already read Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan. They’ve watched Food Inc. and screened it for their friends. Now, they’re eager to take action.

“I think we are at a point where we have stopped talking about what the issues are,” Vo said. “And we are starting to talk about how we are dealing with these issues.”

Kitty Bolte, a 17-year-old high schooler who started a garden at Pacific Collegiate in Santa Cruz, agrees. “I think that we got a lot of people to push the envelope in terms of how people are thinking about food and thinking about activism,” she told me. “The people that I talked to were feeling really good. Going to the conference re-energized them. They were excited to go back to their schools.”

Perhaps on the most exciting characteristics of the sustainable food movement is its insistence on direct action. Ecological farmers and their allies know that there’s no sense in waiting for the political system to reform our food system. We can make progressive change today through the simple acts of growing and selling, buying and eating food that was produced sustainably. The youth wing of the movement understands this intuitively. The idea, Vo said, “is that we should just do what we need to do. We shouldn’t wait for the government. We should experiment, and the rules will catch up with us.”

In that spirit, the final day of the Real Food convergence was spent giving everyone a chance to publicly state their commitments to what they would do when they return to their own schools.

“It was actually really cool,” Vo told me. “People were committing to things as small as, ‘I will have a sustainable food dinner with my family next week.’ To things as large as, ‘I will start a campus gardening campaign with my group this spring.’ Or, ‘I will pick up all the food waste at my high school and see how much food my school is wasting.’”

So, what commitment are you going to make?