In an effort to make the food at Colorado College more sustainable, a team of students is working on an audit of all of the food products that Bon Appétit purchases. Through a program called the Real Food Challenge, these students are assessing every food item sold at CC in order to increase the percentage of organic, local, fair trade foods.
Julian Kraus-Polk, a senior Office of Sustainability intern who organized the audit, believes that this project is important because it will help to align CC’s values with its practices.
“We have these values of sustainability at CC, but we don’t have any transparency as to where we are in actually achieving these values,” said Kraus-Polk.
Kraus-Polk and six other students are calculating the percentage of real food using the Real Food Calculator. The tool was created by the Real Food Challenge, which defines real food as “local/community based, fair, ecologically sound, and/or humane.”
The goal of the Real Food Challenge program is to mobilize youth to stand up for sustainable food values.
Randy Kruse, the General Manager for Bon Appétit at Colorado College, is also excited about the food audit and improving Colorado College’s food purchasing practices, although he says that he is proud of the existing practices. “We try to source as much local and sustainable food as we possibly can,” said Kruse.
The school has adopted policies to source meats without antibiotics or growth hormones, milk without hormones, cage-free eggs, and gestation-crate free pork.
Kruse has been working with the students performing the audit. “A lot of our standards already meet or exceed the standards of the Real Food Calculator,” said Kruse. “However, we are always looking for feedback and the Calculator is a great tool.”
Two years ago, Kraus-Polk did an audit through the Real Food Challenge and found that CC’s food was 33 percent ‘real.’ However, the initial audit only took into account two weeks of Bon Appétit purchasing, whereas this audit will calculate eight weeks of purchasing.
The auditing process also allows students to explore their interest in sustainable food issues on tangible front. “The audit is not only a good metric for the school, but a good educational tool for students to get involved in understanding more about large-scale sustainable food purchasing,” said Kraus-Polk.
Ben Joseph, one of the students helping to perform the audit, is passionate about understanding CC’s food because of his concerns about the environment. “Agriculture is such a huge contributor to environmental degradation in so many ways,” said Joseph. “Colleges have this unique platform where they can promote ideals of sustainability and socially responsible environmentalism.”
By the end of the year, Kraus-Polk hopes to create a commitment that would be signed by managers at Bon Appétit and within the Colorado College administration to increase the percentage of food that qualifies as ‘real.’
The students working on the audit will have results by the first week of Block 8.