WHAT SMITH IS DOING

Dining Services

We Buy Locally

Did you know that in the U.S.A. an average meal travels 1500 miles to reach your plate? The transportation of food products takes a heavy toll on the environment, requiring trucks to drive hundreds or even thousands of extra miles. In order to keep the food fresh while it is being transported, more packaging is needed--packaging that will eventually end up in a landfill somewhere. Not to mention that foods from far away contain fewer nutrients and generally taste worse than locally grown foods.

At Smith Dining Services we strive to buy locally whenever possible, to provide the best dining experience for students while encouraging sustainable practices. Local farms raise crops without heavy use of pesticides and other harmful chemicals, and provide a better life for livestock. Buying locally supports the local economy and helps keep these small family farms in business in a world of corporate factory farms.

A few of the ways that Smith buys locally:

Black River, our produce company, sends us updated lists of locally grown products currently available and notes on our receiving invoices which products in that delivery were grown locally.

For the past 3 years, Smith has been using Fair Trade/Organic coffee purchased from Indigo Coffee Roasters in Florence, MA.

Starting in August, we will be purchasing all our dairy products from High Lawn Dairy in Lee, MA. High Lawn Farm uses only Jersey cows, whose milk is naturally 20% higher in calcium and 17% higher in protein and does not contain any additives, preservatives, or artificial growth rBST hormones.

Since 1945, Dining Services has been purchasing apples from Outlook Farms, located in Westhampton, MA.

The Food Service Directors of the Five Colleges meet monthly, and are in the process of setting up systems that will enable us to work together to purchase even more locally grown products from local farmers and purveyors.

We Recycle

We separate and recycle cardboard, paper, glass, cereal boxes, and plastic in all the kitchens.

Paper dinner napkins in the student dining rooms are made from recycled paper.

The grease from our kitchens is gathered weekly and recycled.

We use compostible plates and flatware at our "grab & go" sites, and at some of our larger all-campus picnics and BBQ's.

We are exploring funding initiatives to re-instate our composting program.

We Re-use

It doesn't make sense to throw something away if it can be re-used, even if it is recyclable. For example, why toss a plastic water bottle? It will just get re-processed into plastic again and used to make another water bottle, at the cost of the energy consumed by the recycling process. It would be more ecologically sound (and cheaper for you) to keep the bottle and refill it over and over again from another water source.

We re-use a wide variety of things in the dining halls and encourage students to do the same:

Black River, our produce company, delivers produce in heavy-duty cardboard boxes that we return to them and that are reused.

We use regular china, flatware, and glasses in our dining rooms that can be washed and reused.

We have taken the "to go" paper- and plasticware out of the dining rooms and encourage students to use Tupperware and hot/cold plastic reusable cups if they wish to take food or beverages out of the dining room.

Last year we purchased and handed out to all students at Central Check-In insulated plastic mugs with lids for hot beverages or soups, and will continue to do so this year.

We use reusable cleaning cloths rather than disposable ones in our dining rooms and kitchens.

We Conserve

Recycling and re-using products can help undo some of the harmful processes used to make them, but an even better solution would be cutting back on wasteful use. In other words, the absolute best way to practice sustainability is to conserve natural resources.

We have installed computers in all our kitchens to speed up communication and cut down on paper usage.

We use bulk dispensers to cut back on packaging materials in our student dining rooms for juices, sodas, milk, ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, and most cereals.

We encourage our chefs to batch cook and to cut down on food waste. Extra food can be used creatively on the salad bar or incorporated into new dishes.

In the summer of 2002, we changed all the coin-operated washing machines on campus to front-loading Maytag Neptune washers. These washers use half the water and a quarter of the detergent top-loaders use, saving the college 1,164,000 gallons of water and 1,706 gallons of detergent each year.