What is “Sourcing” and what do we do?
So Morty signs the Real Food Campus Commitment. We commit to 20% local, sustainable, fair, or humane food by 2020. What happens now? How does Northwestern go from never working with Real Food standards to actually shifting to ethical products?
Not on its own. And not easily. NURF and its partners have to make these changes happen. The first step is the Food Systems Working Group (FSWG). The FSWG’s bi-quarterly meetings bring together various stakeholders in the university food system to talk about Real Food and make product shifts in the dining halls. Undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, administrators, Sodexo employees, NU Dining employees, and food distributors work together to bring more Real Food to Northwestern.
This is where the Sourcing Committee was born and where the work of increasing the Real Food percentage happens. Sourcing, as we call it, is responsible for calculating Northwestern’s Real Food percentage each year and researching and facilitating product shifts to economically and sustainably increase that percentage. But, just like the original campaign to have Morty sign the Campus Commitment, Sourcing’s mission to get Northwestern to 20% Real Food is fueled by students.
The students in the Sourcing Committee work as analysts in Sodexo’s office in Sargent, where we do the nitty gritty work of examining the food products we eat in the dining halls to see which ones are Real Food. Sourcing’s first major accomplishment this quarter was finishing Northwestern’s baseline Real Food percentage, which was truly a mammoth task.
We had to individually track down each item bought for each dining hall for two months out of the 2014 school year -- a whopping 1,280 unique products. For every one of those 1,280 food products we had to trace back to where the product was grown (or raised, or baked, or cooked) and figure out if the growing (or raising, or baking, or cooking) was happening in a way that fits the criteria for Real Food.
The Sourcing analysts worked for months to make sure that the baseline percentage was accurate. But we did it! And now we not only have an official number to present to the stakeholders and the greater Northwestern community, but we also have paved the way for future Northwestern analysts to easily update the percentage every year.
Now that we know how much Real Food Northwestern currently buys (3.11%), Sourcing can focus on making product shifts. This is the meat (hehe) of implementing the Real Food Campus Commitment. We Real Food analysts spend our hours looking for new sources of food that meet the standards for local, sustainable, fair, or humane.
We’ve scrutinized the lists of products that Sodexo most often buys, trying to find any options that are Real. We call farmers from Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan, looking for farms that truly fit the definition of local and community based -- not mega-farms taken over by industry leaders. We look into new food distributors starting up in Chicago with access to local and seasonal food produced in organic or urban farms.
This is the exciting part of Sourcing! We get to present this research to Northwestern Dining and Sodexo at the FSWG, where employees and administrators are working with us to get these Real Food items approved for the dining halls. And now we’re creating this blog to present our work to you!
