Students dining recently at the Trailhead Café on the SUNY-ESF campus were able to get a taste of food grown by fellow students.

Earlier this month food grown at a garden on Lafayette Street was served each day at the Trailhead Café for the “Honorable Harvest” themed week. Students at the college who are members of the Green Campus Initiative, a student organization that focuses mainly on food conservation and sustainability, grew the food. With enough interest in upcoming semesters, GCI hopes to expand the reach and success of its gardens and serve locally grown food to their peers in the cafe, said Ross Mazur, the president of the GCI and a senior environmental resource engineering major.

The club was started through the student sustainability fund at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry. The fund gives money to SUNY-ESF undergraduate or graduate students who come up with project ideas that focus on mitigating negative environmental effects at the local level, specifically those that promote conservation, waste reduction and environmental education.

These types of clubs are valuable because it is important to have an idea of what is required to obtain the food and discover more about how intensive of an agricultural process is required to get it on your plate, Mazur said.

“There’s a lot of practicality that goes into understanding what is required to produce the food that you eat,” he said. “The general public might not know the vast majority of the trees that their fruit and nut crop grow up, they might not be familiar with the types of vegetables that they commonly consume.”

Olivia Donachie, a junior natural resources management major and the garden chair of the GCI, leads groups of club members and volunteers to maintain the off-campus gardens. Donachie said the goal of the club is to make SUNY-ESF more sustainable and that the club is rapidly growing.

“It’s becoming slowly more and more a topic that people are concerned about and wanting to seek changes in,” she said. “It’s grown since I’ve been here. I can tell that things are picking up.”

A few members of GCI will soon be going into dining halls at Syracuse University and at the Trailhead Café to collect food that is being thrown away and bring it to food banks, Donachie said.

“We see something that we don’t like and we talk to the faculty and teachers and try to make changes,” Donachie said.

Diana Johnson, director of dining services, said she has been purchasing food for the Trailhead Café and the dining halls from vendors and farms in the area such as Alambria Springs Farm, Windy Acres Farm and Beak & Skiff Apple Orchards. She said she previously bought the food for students at the State University of New York at Morrisville and said she was very excited to expand the program to SUNY-ESF.

Johnson said she believes that the dining facilities she manages have doubled, possibly tripled, the amount of locally grown food that they purchased from this year to last.

“It’s important to the local community to provide support for our local farmers,” she said. ”I also believe that food is better coming from within the state than being trucked from California; the nutrients hold up better. It’s a healthier product — better for you. And the economy of the local area is just improved. We have to do our part, especially in a college environment.”

Published on October 21, 2014 at 12:01 am

Contact Anjali: acalwis@syr.edu