“Reduce Food Waste in the Greenery by %75 by 2013″ starts on page 89 and outlines the benefits and drawbacks to implementing a pay-by-weight instead of all-you-can-eat system in the Greenery, TESC’s only dining hall.  Benefits, obviously, include far less food wasted, operating under the assumption that when people are paying for how much they eat, they choose portions more carefully. The greenhouse gas savings from food waste reduction are twofold. First, the energy used to produce, distribute, store, process, and cook the (previously wasted) food is saved. And secondly, throwing food out produces greenhouse gas emission as well. Food goes from the plate to the waste can to the landfill, where its decomposition produces copious amounts of methane and carbon dioxide (composting can significantly decrease the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by waste breakdown). The big saver here, since Evergreen already composts its food waste from the Greenery, are the greenhouse gas savings from just not producing the food, and fertilizers and pesticides, in the first place.

So we turn to the front end: how much energy, and what kind, is being used to produce the food on our plates? But, Evergreen contracts its food sourcing to Aramark, a national food service corporation. And Aramark won’t share where they get their food from, so it’s hard to know. And that’s only step one: even if Aramark were willing to share the details of their food purchasing to all us information-hungry greenhouse-gas calculators, according to a former employee of Aramark’s involved in food sourcing, apparently their main supplier Cysco doesn’t even know.

Preposterous, you might say. How can the people serving us food have no idea where it comes from?

Let’s talk about Sysco for a bit.

From the Sysco website:

Since the initial public offering in 1970, when sales were $115 million, SYSCO - an acronym for Systems and Services Company – has grown to $30.3 billion in sales for fiscal year 2005.

Many solid customer relationships have been nurtured along the way, countless dining trends and meal alternatives have evolved, and today the decision to consume meals prepared away from home is as much necessity as choice.

In 1977 SYSCO surpassed its competitors to become the leading supplier to “meals-prepared-away-from-home” operations in North America. Since then, the industry it serves has expanded from $35 billion to more than $200 billion.

How did Sysco do this? Sysco got its start in 1969 by acquiring 8 other small distributors: the goal, according to an article on Funding Universe, was to “distribute any food despite its regional availability.” (emphasis mine). Add freezers, a fleet of trucks, dozens of acquisitions of regional distributors, and 32,000 employees and 14.5 billion dollars in net worth later you have Sysco today.

The key for Sysco was the commodification of food. Sysco is the perfect example of the disconnect between “business” and reality:  when your number one concern is delivering a product anywhere you want to as fast as you can with as little cost as possible, you create an environment that sacrifices everything else along the way. Sysco’s success came from economies of scale, from building a giant national network able to deliver anything from anywhere to anyone. I can just see the confused receptionist now: “You want to know where the food is from? What food? At Sysco we provide product, value added.“

For example, an enthusiastic Sysco customer demonstrates describes samples at a Sysco expo:

“Plastic bags of avocado halves, lime green, bearing little resemblance to the fruit with a peel and a pit. They’ve done all the work, i.e. taken all the nature out of it, and what is left can be preserved, packaged, shipped from a warehouse, manipulated and commodified even further before it hits your, the customer’s, plate. Cha-ching.”

Little surprise Sysco can’t tell you where the food comes from. And little surprise Aramark uses Sysco as a distributor, probably as one of their main distributors (though we may never know), for all that delicious frozen pizza and pre-made lasagna. Aramark uses a business-as-normal model and, correct me if I’m wrong, but their bottom line is the same bottom line that got them to the top of the food service industry: money money money money, baby.

Some people estimate that the food supply chain, from farm to fork, accounts for up to %20 of the greenhouse-gas emissions in the United States.  As global citizens and members of the Evergreen community, how can we begin to make informed decisions about what path to take to reduce greenhouse gas emissions when the people we buy our food from make their living by treating food as a commodity? Our challenge is to educate ourselves and each other. I don’t know what your interest is, but mine in particular is food. How can we have a conversation about food when one half of the conversation is unable, by their very nature, to speak?