Tufts students can now put their money where their mouths are, thanks to a variety of local food programs that have recently cropped up at the university.
Today, the first Tufts Farmer's Market will be held at the Campus Center and will feature local produce as well as products made with local ingredients. The on-campus market is the brainchild of senior Arielle Carpenter, the founder of the organization FoodTalk.
"[FoodTalk] focuses on collaboration between Tufts Dining and the student body, so students have a voice in what they're eating on campus," Carpenter said. "In the spring, we decided that we were going to merge FoodTalk with the Tufts Culinary Society. At that point, we were discussing different ideas for the next year and we came up with the idea of a farmer's market during the fall to encourage supporting local agriculture and eating locally."
FoodTalk's partnership with Tufts Dining is an important element of the farmer's market, as Dining Services is handling the financial end of the event.
"What's really great is that Tufts Dining is supporting us with this. They're helping us buy all the produce that they would normally buy from their vendors. We're able to use their resources, and whatever we aren't able to sell, they will absorb back into the dining halls," Carpenter said.
Tufts Nutrition Marketing Specialist Julie Lampie said that Dining Services has long been a supporter of incorporating local foods into its menu and agenda.
"Dining Services has been purchasing local foods for many years, especially during first semester when the harvest in the northeast is at its height," Lampie said. "The farmer's market is something we've wanted to do for a long time to highlight the benefits of purchasing of local foods."
The market will offer both fresh fruits and vegetables — such as pears, peaches, apples, zucchini or squash, green peppers, cucumbers, tomatoes and corn — as well as apple cider and homemade pumpkin and zucchini breads baked at Tufts with local ingredients.
"We're starting small, so we're only ordering a case of each type of fruit and vegetable," Carpenter said. But because of Dining Services' role, "we really shouldn't be losing any money in case it doesn't go as well as we planned."
Despite the abundance of other farmer's markets in the area, Carpenter felt that bringing local food to the Hill was an important priority.
"There are some staff members who don't have time to get to farmer's markets, and if they could buy them during lunch break … they were really excited about that. And there are people on campus who have their own kitchens; they'd be interested in having the farmer's market come to them. Bringing them to campus is a good way to educate students about local food and have everything be really accessible," she said.
In addition to being a convenient way to fill the fridge, the market will also serve as an educational tool about the benefits of eating locally. Lampie and Carpenter explained that besides being tastier and more nutritious, local food helps support local businesses and cuts down on the energy costs associated with shipping, leading to positive environmental effects.
"Either people will be really interested, or people can get things they don't have to cook, like apple cider and breads," Carpenter said. "We have educational materials to hand out to people. My goal specifically is just education and awareness — if we can have people come by and we help them realize that farmer's markets are around, that it's a really good way to support local agriculture, and that it's really healthy."
Students' awareness of local food and organic produce has been growing, due in part to events like food writer Michael Pollan's lecture last spring and the efforts of many student groups, including Environmental Consciousness Outreach, which led a sustainable agriculture campaign last year, and a new Slow Food group at the Friedman School of Nutrition and Policy. Despite this emerging interest, Lampie said that college students today know less about how their food gets from the pasture to their plate than did generations past.
"It's hard to say, but that's why we try to promote it every year. I would say probably they're not all that aware of where their food is grown and probably aren't as knowledgeable as they could be of the local politics regarding food," she said. "I think this generation is just not aware necessarily of where food originates from. My generation, we knew about farms. Farms were near cities. Now with the sprawling suburbia, there are [fewer] farms that are in these areas. People are less exposed to the family farms of yesteryear, and a lot have been sold off and developed."
Farmer's markets attempt to make the connection between buyer and producer less nebulous, and it may be this effort that has made them so successful.
"Farmer's markets are a lot more popular and people are supporting the local food market in droves. It has taken off in the last five years beyond belief. I've never seen a movement gain so much strength in so short a time," Lampie said.
Besides being locally grown, the produce at the Tufts Farmer's Market is also unique because it will be supplied by the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project, an initiative run by the Friedman School in partnership with an anti-poverty organization in Lowell, Mass. Although New Entry's core program offers training on farm education so that participants can start farms as business enterprises, it also has a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) component to distribute produce and provide a reliable market for the program's participants.
The CSA allows members to help out with some of the farms' production costs in exchange for the delivery of a weekly box of fruits and vegetables.
"Right now, the multi-producer CSA has about 15 producers, and we service about 300 families. We started doing the Lowell area, but now we have drop-offs at various locations, including Tufts," Kimberley Fitch, the program and finance coordinator for New Entry said. "Interest has been growing. If people sign up, they get to experience neat crops from farmers from all over the world. [The farmers] grow what's familiar to them and they're from all over the world so people get to experience ethnic crops and be adventurous."
CSA Coordinator Matthew Himmel will be at the farmer's market talking to students about the program.
"Matthew Himmel is overseeing the CSA, and this could be an opportunity for his group to get involved. They're capable of running a farmer's market," Lampie said. "This is like a trial for them. We'll see how much interest there is among students and faculty. We're hoping it's so successful that it will become a weekly event during the fall next year."
Even if Tufts proves to have enough "locavores" to make a weekly farmer's market feasible, it will only become a regular occurrence further in the future — not because of a lack of interest or funding, but simply because of nature's harvest cycle.
"This is kind of it for now," Carpenter said. "Maybe in the spring when stuff starts growing again, but this is kind of the end of the season actually. Things are starting to die out, and we're not even sure if we'll be able to get nectarines and peaches [for this week's market]."
"The challenge is that local food is only available in the summer — when students don't tend to be here — and the fall, and in the next few weeks it will start declining," Lampie said.
To highlight the local items provided in the dining halls, each year Dining Services puts on the Harvest Food Festival. This year's festival took place last week and featured a caramel apple station, apple cider and one other unique event.
"A few years ago, someone suggested that [Dining Services] buy the corn unshucked, which is cheaper for them. We have volunteers standing at the doors of the dining halls asking students to shuck one or two ears of corn that will be served for dinner. For every ear shucked, they will donate money to Groundwork Somerville, which encourages gardens and healthy eating for elementary school children," Carpenter said.
The various partnerships that have formed to promote local eating at Tufts reflect the many connections it takes to bring just one meal to the dinner table.
"The whole industrialized food that we've come to know in this country, the cheap food that is provided to us, it's cheaper than probably everywhere else in the world, but there are environmental costs associated with factory farms," Lampie said.
