Author: Sarah Corsa
A Veg Club report investigating Campus Dining’s meat sources revealed that while the processed meat may come from local distributors, the live animals are raised in some of the country’s largest factory farms that are notorious for inhumane and unsustainable practices. Kara McVey ’13 submitted the report last spring for the “UEP 306: Food and the Environment” class. McVey, along with members from Veg Club, traced the names Campus Dining gives for their meat suppliers backward from distributor to transporter and, finally, to the primary source.
Meyer’s All-Natural Angus Beef, which supplies the burgers served on campus, was traced back to Cargill, the largest privately held corporation in the U.S. The company has been criticized for violating human rights standards including forced child labor, environmental degradation through deforestation and palm oil extraction, mercury poisoning and countless meat recalls that have resulted in illnesses and deaths.
“Literally everything that you would think of that a company could do wrong, Cargill has done wrong, and we’re purchasing from them because it’s so non–transparent because their name isn’t anywhere to be found on anything,” Veg Club president and politics major Brandilyn Tebo (junior) said. “All it says is ‘Meyer’s All–Natural Beef,’ and what does natural actually mean? It doesn’t mean anything in terms of things Oxy students would actually care about.”
After uncovering this information, Veg Club presented the report to Campus Dining and proposed solutions that would enable them to purchase meat from more sustainable and humane sources. According to Tebo, Veg Club would like the Homestyle station at the Marketplace to serve entirely vegan options. This change would reduce the meat consumption on campus and therefore allow Campus Dining to purchase from more expensive yet sustainable sources, while also establishing a station that vegans and vegetarians can depend on at every meal.
The price of locally grown meat and the quantity of meat required to satiate the student body [are] the main obstacles to finding alternate meat sources, according to Student Intern for Sustainability Research and Implementation Dylan Bruce. Campus Dining is at the mercy of a complicated system that extends beyond the perimeter of Occidental College. Campus Dining must acknowledge a variety of factors such as meeting student demand, keeping prices low and maintaining reasonable line lengths at the Marketplace.
“We can’t really just impose a switch to all sustainable meat because a lot of times, that’s 200 percent the cost of what a conventional alternative would be,” Bruce said. “So we can’t just double the price on an entree option without making sure that there’s student interest.”
Within the larger food system, local and affordable distributors are difficult to come by, according to Bruce. Profitable factory farms can supply a product that is cheap and convenient, especially for an institution that needs to cook for a large audience and therefore relies on dependable and homogeneous products.
“We are, to a certain extent, locked into what the food system has sort of turned into,” Bruce said. “An institution that’s our size, with the food budget that we have, can’t really affect the production chain too much.”
Until student demand changes, other smaller transformations are being implemented this year. Campus Dining is switching from farm-raised to wild caught salmon in the Marketplace and attempting to improve communication about what vegan and vegetarian options are available on any given day.
“Regarding the wild caught salmon, we are negotiating with the supplier (Superior Seafood) this week – to make sure they can provide a consistent source of the wild caught salmon at a stable price. If all goes well we will be able to make the switch right away,” Associate Vice President for Hospitality Services Amy Munoz said in an email.
Through participating in the National Real Food Challenge, Occidental increased its percentage of “real food” – defined as locally grown, sustainable, humane and fair–trade products – to over 20 percent this year. Its goal is to increase the amount of overall real food to 40 percent by 2020.
“We need to all bring awareness to these issues so that we can lower the demand so that we can make a switch to farms that follow some sort of humane standards, some sort of social responsibility,” Tebo said.
To fully realize the goal of improving the school’s meat quality, both Bruce and Tebo agree that change must come from the student body.
“Students vote with their dollar, so if people start to patronize the organic bar a bunch more, then we’re going to see an increase in the availability of organic meat options,” Bruce said.
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