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WAYS FORWARD
‘Can I have oat milk instead?’: Building a sustainable campus food system goes beyond cutting single-use plastics Words by Alex Nguyen Illustrations by Rachel Cheang
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offee was the first thing on our minds as SEEDS Sustainability Program Manager Liska Richer and I walked into the Orchard Commons dining hall for an interview about sustainable food systems on a rainy December morning. “Can I have a latte with almond milk please?” said Richer, before something caught her eye. “Oh actually, can I have oat milk instead?” At the time, I didn’t give the switch much thought. How much is there really to something as basic as a cup of coffee? As Richer would later point out during the interview, the answer is a lot. “Climate-friendly food has more to do than whether or not you just eat meat or don’t eat meat,” she said. “If you’re looking at the issues with almonds in California and how water-intensive they are, so I was really pleased to see today that they have oat milk. “And we’ve got fair-trade coffee, excellent. Is it shade grown? The sugar that we put in there, is that fair trade? … How much sugar are we putting in there?” While much public attention has
been given to phasing out single-use plastic at UBC, there are many other complex considerations and initiatives that go into building a sustainable campus food system. Given its scope, this goal has demanded and will continue to demand the full capacity of the ever-expanding UBC Food System Project (UBCFSP).
‘A LIVING LABORATORY’ From reducing single-use plastic items to purchasing only sustainable seafood, the university community is working to build a sustainable campus food system. But these well-publicized initiatives are just the tip of the effort. In fact, this goal has been central to the UBCFSP, the longest-running collaborative project at this university. Started in 2001 by SEEDS and the Faculty of Land and Food Systems (LFS), the UBCFSP — through its capstone course, LFS 450 — has pulled together research from over 2,000 students, faculty members and community groups who study not only how the university community consumes food, but also how it produces, processes, markets, disposes of and recovers food. Currently, the project lists “climate friendly food systems, zero waste and circular economy, biodiverse food systems, food justice and sovereignty, urban food production and systemic food insecurity” among its priorities. The project also allows students to present their recommendations to
their community partners for implementation. In many cases, they help to inform changes in policies and programming. Former LFS 450 student Olivia Light recalled doing a baseline audit of UBC Food Services’ food vision and values plan. Focusing on Feast, Gather and Open Kitchen, her team would go into these three first-year residence dining halls at different meal times to evaluate the offering of plant-based options, the transparency of nutritional information labelling and the affordability of different categories of food. “One of our main suggestions was to look at that affordability and see where Food Services could do a little more to make sure that students are able to have not just affordable menu items on campus but ones that are healthy as well,” she said. “To see that UBC Food Services was able to just recently open up that $5 [Fooood] cafe, it was connected to one of our biggest hopes for implementation.” Their end result also could leave a physical legacy on campus. Born out of a UBCFSP initiative in 2007, the Orchard Garden on Totem Field continues to provide not only an outdoor classroom for all levels of study but also a food-growing space for Agora Cafe. “It’s a living laboratory,” said Richer about UBCFSP broadly. “What we’re experiencing here is like we’re a microcosm and part of what the broader systems around us, the city of
