The Fellows with the Hobart Center for Foodservice Sustainability have announced a $5,000 grant to Bates College Dining Services for its comprehensive approach to food service sustainability, and have named Director of Dining Services Christine Schwartz as an HCFS Fellow.

Bates was judged as having the best sustainability program from among 13 entrants nationwide, which included K-12 schools and higher educational institutions, health care and hospitality facilities.

“Every year the level of participation and interest in sharing sustainable practices continues to expand,” says Rick Cartwright, vice president, ITW Food Equipment Group, and HCFS Fellow. Cartwright said that “Bates College stood out as a best-practice example showing a broad level of impact across many aspects of sustainability.”

Prompted by a generous gift from an anonymous donor, the opening of a new dining facility and the passion on the part of students to know more about the foods they were eating, Bates College undertook a yearlong initiative to explore connections between the dining program, food and the educational mission of the college itself. “Nourishing Body and Mind: Bates Contemplates Food” was launched in September 2008. Overall, Bates College decreased energy consumption and water use, reduced solid waste, and implemented a Farm-to-Fork program, expanding the purchasing of local, sustainable foods. From these initiatives, Bates College realized an annual saving totaling more than $80,000.

“Bates, like many colleges, believes that the environment must be taken into consideration when purchasing, creating, delivering and serving food products. And our dining program has integrated environmental stewardship into every decision regarding dining and food services,” says Schwartz, who will help select future operations for grant recognition while serving as an HCFS Fellow. “We are committed to continuing to develop the Bates Contemplates Food initiative and are grateful for the funds from the HCFS to assist us in doing so.”

Bates is the third recipient of the annual award. The winners in previous years were the University of California, Santa Cruz and Dickinson College.

The science-based Guiding Stars system rates foods with zero to three stars highlighting items according to good, better or best nutritional value, respectively. The program’s revision is the first since being launched three years ago by the Hannaford supermarket chain.

“I can see the world through food,” said Kirsten Walter ’00, perhaps speaking for all the participants in a wide-ranging Bates discussion of food-related topics on March 16. “I can see all these different issues,” she said, “and how to approach them and how to engage people with them.”

Walter, director of the St. Mary’s Nutrition Center, was one of four Maine-based Bates alumni, each an expert in food issues, who took part in a panel discussion sponsored by the College’s Nourishing Body and Mind: Bates Contemplates Food initiative.

Walter joined artisanal baker Jim Amaral ’80, founder of Borealis Breads, and two farmers: Nicolas Lindholm ’86, who owns Hackmatack Farm in Penobscot, and Steve Hoad ’72, of Emma’s Family Farm in Windsor.

The discussion traced the concept of “good food” — local, nutritious, delicious, natural or organic — across a roadmap of knotty questions. How do you make a living growing food? How sincere is the supermarket industry’s commitment to local, healthy foods? How can food help empower, nourish and be affordable to low-income communities?

An audience of some 40 students, Bates staff and local farmers attended the event in Pettengill Hall. Anna Bartel, of the Harward Center for Community Partnerships at Bates, moderated.

To begin the 80-minute program, the Bates alumni shared how and why they embarked upon their current paths. Amaral, a sourdough breadmaker whose story of success is well-known, focused on one of his proudest accomplishments: the role he has played in re-establishing wheat production in Maine after an absence of about a century.

His early attempts to source wheat in Maine, Amaral said, were discouraging, as the grain was sometimes spoiled or contaminated. Those problems reflected what happens when “you lose a whole industry, you lose the whole network of relationships between farmers and millers and bakers, and the challenges of actually recreating that.”

Lindholm had a good-food conversion experience as a Bates student, then held several jobs related to sustainable agriculture and now makes about half a year’s living — with carpentry filling the gap — through selling his organic produce directly to consumers.

He plans to build a freezing plant, the state’s first intended for a strictly organic growing operation, for wild blueberries — a fruit native to this region. “Working with a crop that’s native to our land has a lot of meaning for me,” he said.

Hoad and Lindholm expressed a common depth of idealism about farming. Coming to Bates, Hoad left development-wracked New Jersey for a relatively unspoiled Maine, bringing with him with visions of working his own land with his family.

Hoad explained that his farm is deeded back to 1820 and the Hoads are only the fourth family to occupy it. The first owners had the place from 1820 until 1950. “You can feel those people in this land,” he said.

Now he and his daughter Rose raise poultry, pigs and produce that they sell from the farm, with the goal of making the food affordable to all comers.

Walter, who has dedicated her career to food justice, picked up Hoad’s theme of accessible food. She traced her interest in food justice to her youth in California, where her early concern about farming’s impact on the environment gave way to the realization that she needed to consider “the people in that environment” — migrant farm workers.

Walter may be best-known at Bates and in Lewiston for founding Lots to Gardens, an organization that uses community gardens in Lewiston to empower young people and their neighborhoods. “I really wanted to see how we could use [the work of] connecting people to their food, connecting people to their landscape and each other, as a means of building a voice and power.”

Walter described a food assessment, undertaken by the St. Mary’s Nutrition Center and local colleges including Bates, that has revealed the difficulty of putting together a nutritious meal in downtown Lewiston. Of 67 stores that sell groceries, only seven sell all the basics for a well-rounded meal. And small downtown markets, she said, charge almost 50 percent more than the supermarkets, which are away from downtown, for the same basket of foods.

“Everybody deserves access to good food,” Walter said. “It shouldn’t be a privilege. It’s a right.”

Much of the conversation revolved around the supermarket industry and its efforts to meet the increasing demand for local and organic foods. As Amaral pointed out, the industry is willing to pay lip service to local food as long as consumers demand it, but at root, the current model — based on inexpensive commodities, large-scale processing and far-flung supply networks — is making money for them. If Maine was growing half or more of its own food, he said, “I’m not sure that the supermarkets could really prosper in that environment.”

Farmers in the audience, meanwhile, pointed out that even as supermarkets turn more to local growers for produce, they are imposing requirements on small growers and processors that make it impossible to profit. Mandates, such as liability insurance or certain security and sanitation measures, that make all kinds of sense for industrial-scale producers make none at all for small, hands-on operations.

Steve Hoad offered a telling example. At his roadside stand, he sells sweet corn grown by a farm that also supplies a local branch of a major supermarket chain. His customers are always surprised to hear that, Hoad says, because the corn from his stand tastes so much better than the supermarket’s.

The reason is simple. Corn loses flavor rapidly once it’s picked. The corn that Hoad sells is no more than a day and a half old, if that. But the supermarket chain, fearing that one fine day the farm might fail to deliver on time, insists on keeping as much as a seven-day supply on hand.

The farmer can’t convince the chain “that he’ll continue to show up,” even after 10 years of working together, Hoad said.

While Sylvan Ellefson ’09 hasn’t banished sweets or Commons crispitos from his diet, he’s honed an understanding of what his body needs to perform at peak level.

“I was definitely not conscious of eating a balanced diet my first year here,” says Ellefson, a Nordic skier from Vail, Colo., who won All-America honors at last year’s NCAA Skiing Championships. “But in the past two years I’ve really realized what it means.”

Now, he and his teammates consider Bates Dining Services to be part of their team. “Commons does a great job of providing us with the food we need for how we train,” Ellefson says.

For example, when the Nordic team travels during carnival season, their van carries Commons-provided food like granola, breads, fruits, and yogurt. Not for the skiers’ major meals — they get meal money for that — but for quick post-race nutrition. “Your body recovers more quickly if you get food right after a race,” explains Sam Evans-Brown ’09, Ellefson’s teammate.

When it comes to establishing healthy food routines, the teammates support each other, says head coach Becky Flynn Woods ’89. “It’s about getting into the right habit. For example, the skiers racing later in the day will take time in the morning to prepare food, like PB&Js, for everyone to eat right after
the races.”

These days, the Nordic team’s training is especially motivated, what with Bates hosting this season’s NCAA Championships, March 11–14. For Ellefson, a Colorado-raised skier not recruited by any Division I schools out West, his competitive cup runneth over. “I’m proud to race as a Bobcat,” he says. “I love it in Maine.”

An alpine enthusiast growing up, Ellefson and his Vail Mountain School soccer buddies took up cross-country skiing to stay in shape during the winter. As a high school sophomore, he won skimeister as the best performer in Nordic and alpine events. By then, he knew his forte was Nordic so he dropped alpine, comparing it to choosing soccer over baseball when, as a little kid, he “couldn’t hit the ball off the tee.” But as a relative latecomer to Nordic skiing, Ellefson came East for college when Division I schools passed him up.

Highly competitive by nature, Ellefson describes his mother, Tashina, as a “tremendous” athlete. His late father, Lyndon, who helped found the sport of skyrunning — high-altitude, long-distance running — died in 1998 when, on a training run near Cervinia, Italy, he fell into a hidden snow crevasse, dropping 75 feet to his death.

Sylvan Ellefson is well-aware of his father’s reputation as a highly motivated competitor who pushed himself hard. “I feel that if I can do something really well, I can carry on his legacy,” he says. “In my case that’s Nordic skiing.” Looking ahead to his post-Bates racing career, he wants to “get to that level,” referencing the accomplishments of Nordic alums like Justin Freeman ’98, a 2006 U.S. Olympian, “and then do better.”

Ellefson’s specialty is freestyle, like skating on skis, and he earned trips to the NCAA Championships in both 2006 and 2007. Last year was a breakthrough season, as he won freestyle races at the season-ending carnivals at Williams and Middlebury, the first-ever wins for a Bates Nordic skier on the Eastern Collegiate Skiing Association circuit. At the 2008 NCAA Championships, Ellefson finished fourth in the 10K freestyle, one of only three Americans, and the only Division III skier, in the top 10.

While Ellefson targets another top-five finish, teammate Evans-Brown, a Spanish major from Gilmanton Iron Works, N.H., is so eager to qualify for his first NCAAs that he spent last summer in Argentina, living with a government official who’s a cross-country enthusiast, so he could train on snow. “I had easy access to skiing and was well-fed,” he says. “Lots of meat, for breakfast, lunch, snacks.”

There, he earned a reputation as “the kid who always eats,” and Evans-Brown estimates that he and Ellefson will take in 6,000 to 9,000 calories a day while training hard. That’s more than triple the typical daily diet of 2,500 calories — if not quite the famous 12,000-a-day regimen of Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps.

While the Nordic team tends to frequent Italian restaurants on the road for a good balance between protein and carbs, “what you eat right before a race is not so important, I think,” Evans-Brown says. What’s critical is “fueling yourself well while you’re training.”

At a recent campus meal, Ellefson and Evans-Brown are joined by Nicole Ritchie ’09 of East Dummerston, Vt. Twice an All-American rower as well as a skier, she has begun to avoid processed food. “A friend is doing a thesis that focuses on corn syrup,” she says. “I’ve been reading over her shoulder. The amount of energy going into producing corn syrup is pretty disgusting.”

In the new dining Commons, Ritchie gravitates toward local products: apple cider from Greenwood Orchards, chocolate milk from Oakhurst Dairy, and hamburgers from grass-fed, Cold Spring Ranch beef (see page 16) for her training fuels. She also frequents the vegan bar.

“Making your own food choices takes a lot of different economic and environmental issues into your hands,” says Ritchie. “It’s really cool that Commons supports us in making these decisions.”

Shervin Chambers '12 told a Creole Table gathering about the island of St. Lucia.

It feels like Mom’s kitchen, but with a few more people around. The bustling, warm atmosphere and the smell of cooking make the small kitchen homey and relaxing. Lively music can barely be heard over the animated chatter.

After wandering around for several minutes, I have made my way into the kitchen. I’m attempting to dice red peppers and thinking that I probably should have spent less time with the takeout menu and more quality time in the kitchen with my mother learning how not to slice off a finger.

It’s Friday afternoon, Oct. 3, and this is my first visit to Bates’ Multicultural Center. The occasion is one of the center’s Creole Tables — dinner gatherings whose presentations explore the variety of multiracial, multiethnic cultures called Creole. Staff, students and faculty get together to make dinner and discuss a particular nation and its Creole culture, building bridges between different groups within the college.

Tonight, Shervin Chambers ’12 of Brooklyn, N.Y., will talk about St. Lucia, an island in the eastern Caribbean where he lived until 2005. Past Creole Table speakers have included Myrna Manzanares, president of the National Kriol Council of Belize, and Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, an essayist, novelist and poet from Equatorial Guinea.

“Creole” means different things to different nations. In the United States, Creole culture is central in Louisiana, where Creole refers to people descended from French settlers (but not Acadian French, who are called Cajuns). These people share a rich cultural background and live in Francophone communities.

In the Caribbean, Creole refers to the fusion among African, European and native cultures, and the term is applied to all people born and raised in the region.

Crossing distinctions between generations and between faculty, students and staff, tonight’s group includes Charles Nero, associate professor of rhetoric; Tonya Taylor ’02, program coordinator for the Multicultural Affairs office; Baltasar Fra-Molinero, associate professor of Spanish; and Theodore Sutherland, a sophomore from Ghana.

The menu is usually chosen by the evening’s presenter. Tonight, the sweet red peppers I’m chopping are for the green figs and saltfish, St. Lucia’s national dish. Saltfish is dried salted fish, normally cod.

The saltfish is boiled to remove some salt, chopped fine, sautéed with chives, garlic, tomatoes and other seasonings, and then served with boiled green bananas. As soon as it’s ready and on the table, I can’t help sneaking a bite of the flavorful dish.

We’ve also made chicken and dumplings, and sweet and savory slices of fried green plantains that allay our hunger until the rest of the food is ready. As we eat, Chambers gives us a presentation on St. Lucia, complete with a tourist video and an explanation of the island’s flag, displayed boldly in the kitchen.

Questions range from St. Lucia’s economy to the origin of the island’s name (a Christian martyr of Roman times), to island race relations to, ultimately, where and how quickly we can buy plane tickets to relax on those sandy beaches. Chambers tells us he can’t wait to move back.

As we eat (I go back for seconds), he plays a video of traditional St. Lucian dancing, and we view slideshow images of the island — including a food stall where the main dish is exactly the one we’re putting in our mouths, green figs and saltfish.

“Food brings people together,” Chambers says. “And preparing the food, cooking the food, you learn a lot of what goes into it, and just from doing that, you know so much about the culture.”

Gabe Clark '02, with his wife, Amanda Waterhouse Clark '02, raise grass-fed beef on their farm in North New Portland, Maine.

The Bates Contemplates Food initiative is a call for an informed examination of food choices. For many of us, these choices involve what foods to buy. A select few, though — such as the alumni on enumerated below — are choosing what foods to produce for the people who buy.

And while every food decision is a life decision, the choices made by people whose livings depend on producing food take place on planes different from the ones we occupy.

At one extreme, there’s the importance of dirt. Dirt is furthest from your mind when you tuck into a sustainable, made-in-Maine dinner of grass-fed beef from Cold Spring Ranch and organic salad from Hackmatack Farm.

But for Gabe Clark ’02, whose cattle thrive on Cold Spring Ranch grass, and vegetable grower Nicolas Lindholm ’86, dirt is all important. Soil quality can make or break their products.

“It’s taken me years to realize that I don’t need to put so much attention toward growing the tomato plant,” says Lindholm. “I put my attention toward growing healthy soil, and the tomato plant just comes along very happily on its own.”

Then there’s the macro view. By choosing to work in Maine, Jason Perkins ’97 and the husband-wife team of Tim Kane ’82 and Beth George ’85 have engaged in a conflict that conscientious consumers face every day: what’s desirable vs. what’s local.

Perkins is brewmaster for Allagash, a popular craft beermaker. Kane and George run a bakery dedicated to the unusual grain called spelt. Both businesses can legitimately claim to be “local” and “sustainable.” And yet: Allagash brings in hops and malted barley from across the U.S.; Canada and the Midwest produce the spelt for George and Kane’s business.

Neither Perkins nor the Spelt Right bakers want to rely on supplies shipped long distances, with the attendant carbon emissions and loss to the local economy. All are actively seeking Maine sources.

But in the meantime, they negotiate daily a thicket of complex food questions, just like the rest of us — except for the rest of us, the quantities aren’t in tons and livelihoods aren’t at stake.

So, if you need a break from your own food choices or a new perspective on them, meet this group of Batesies whose most important food choice has been simply (but not so simply) to produce it in Maine.

Photographs and reporting by Phyllis Graber Jensen

Text and reporting by Doug Hubley

Bates’ purchase of local food is helping Maine farmers and food providers. The investment earnings from a [intlink id="5740" type="post"]$2.5 million donation[/intlink] earmarked for Dining Services is being used strictly to buy more locally grown natural and organic foods.

To capture that story, a video news team from WCSH-TV6, Portland’s NBC affiliate, went first to Blackie’s Farm Fresh Produce, a greengrocer in Auburn, and then to Bates, to interview Director of Dining Services Christine Schwartz. “They have great product, great services,” said Schwartz of Blackie’s.” They have been very supportive of us, and we of them.”

For the first time, many locals learned Blackie’s real name: He is Norman Labbe. He has owned his all-weather farm stand for 22 years. Before that, his family owned a grocery store in Lewiston for 68 years.

Watch the story (2 minutes, 19 seconds).

If any of the 550 or so members of the Class of 2012 wondered yesterday just why they were at Bates College, their academic home for the next four years, Margaret Imber had a straightforward answer.

“You are here to fall in love,” said Imber, featured speaker at the College’s [intlink id="11379" type="post"]Convocation[/intlink] ceremony and an associate professor of classical and medieval studies.

Under a clear blue sky, Bates staff and upperclass students joined the [intlink id="11383" type="post"]first-years[/intlink] and faculty on Bates’ historic Quad for the ceremony that opened the college’s 154th academic year. Imber shared the podium with Dean of the Faculty Jill Reich, student government president Paul Suitter ’09, Multifaith Chaplain Bill Blaine-Wallace and President Elaine Tuttle Hansen, who used her turn at the microphone to introduce the yearlong initiative Nourishing Body and Mind: Bates Contemplates Food.

• Watch video of President Hansen’s and Professor Imber’s talks

Having tickled her listeners with the L-word, Imber quickly clarified her intent. “The love of which I speak, however, is not romantic — although if you are lucky you will be seduced,” she said.

“You are here at Bates to find an idea, a problem, a poem or a project in which you will become interested, and then engaged and finally enthralled.”

Titled How Not to Fall in Love, Imber’s talk employed the rhetorical device “via negativa” — Latin for “negative way” — whose exaggerated arguments supporting one viewpoint actually prove the opposite.

Extending her metaphor equating love with a liberal arts education, Imber offered a few rules for “dating” — that is, pursuing Bates academics. One of her rules for not falling in love, for instance, involves the second date: “If you never call her after the first date, you can be darn sure you’re not going to fall in love.

“Similarly, to be sure that you will not find the area of academic study that engages your passion, it is very important that you never re-read anything,” a line that drew knowing chuckles from the faculty. “When you read something a second time you understand it better. You notice the subtleties of an argument.”

In conclusion, said Imber, “I hope these rules and corollaries help you. If you follow them carefully, you’ll find that in four years you’ll have … transformed your College education into the equivalent of ‘Thinking for Dummies…’

“If you break my rules, however, you may fall in love, and in that love find a transformative experience that will give you the will, and the strength, and the skill to engage the world and change it into a better place.”

Following a guidance-heavy orientation weekend for the incoming class, and in contrast to Imber’s humorous welcoming gift of a positive message wrapped up in negative advice, President Hansen started her address by telling the new students, “I am going to offer you no advice at all.”

Instead, she reported on strategic developments affecting all members of the Bates community. One was the campus master planning process, whose first phase has found fruition in the [intlink id="3854" type="post"]new student residence[/intlink] at 280 College St., the [intlink id="3854" type="post"]new dining Commons[/intlink], the cross-campus [intlink id="6979" type="post"]Alumni Walk[/intlink] and the repurposing, now under way, of two residences into academic buildings.

“It’s time to dust off the plans for the second phase” of the planning process, Hansen said, “and re-examine our options in the light of what we have achieved and what has changed.”

Involving what she described as “the more intangible structures that house this dynamic, evolving, ambitious intellectual community,” Hansen also brought up the overall planning process for Bates’ course into the 21st century. During the past year, drawing on the energies of hundreds of members of the Bates community, this wide-ranging process has generated three categories of initiatives for bettering Bates: ideas for administrative action; for further deliberation and exploration; and for College-wide engagement in the near future.

Hansen invited the participation of the entire campus as these initiatives are refined and considered.

Bates Contemplates Food concluded Hansen’s talk. Bates’ yearlong examination of food issues, she explained, was inspired by both the opening of the new Commons last February and an anonymous alum’s [intlink id="5740" type="post"]donation of $2.5 million[/intlink] to support the College’s purchases of local, natural and organic foodstuffs.

“These circumstances underscore the already outstanding commitment of Bates Dining Services to sustainable local purchasing and operations. Initiated in 1986 — I think that’s before some of you were born — ours is one of the longest-running such programs in the U.S.,” she said, noting the college’s achievements in both the sustainable sourcing of food and Dining Services‘ recycling of some 80 percent of its waste products.

Fresh from a summer of assigned books about knotty food-supply issues by authors Steve Ettlinger and Michael Pollan (who speaks at Bates Oct. 27), the Class of 2012 received a few additions to the bibliography from the president.

She pointed to Michael Specter’s “Big Foot,” a February 2008 New Yorker article, as an illustration of the complexity, the lack of ready answers, inherent in making sustainable food choices.

Bates Contemplates Food, Hansen said, would further invite students to ponder such questions as: “Why is a strong and healthy food culture important to both individuals and communities?” and “What is the relationship between how we eat and how we think?”

Providing an entrée into such questions was the centerpiece of Hansen’s food discussion, two stories that she held up for consideration. Both illustrated the power of food and dining practices as cultural symbols.

Hansen’s extended reading from Virginia Woolf’s essay “A Room of One’s Own” used vivid comparisons of two university meals — one lavish, one meager — to contrast the status of men and women in the early 20th century.

In sharp contrast to Woolf’s stratified social milieu, the second story, of course, was about Bates and its new Commons, which brings into the 21st century the College’s long tradition of dining as a community under one roof. The facility, she said, “lies at the center of our campus and of our educational mission. It reminds us that a liberal education prepares a whole human being — heart, body and mind.

“Today, in the high-speed, high-tech, competitive and distracting world where we eat too much and too fast and too often alone, it’s critical to assure that thoughtful and ethical human interaction is still at the core of Bates.”