Both a literal and more figurative pickle often confronts me in the supermarkets of Westwood: to buy the expensive veggies, or to skimp on the healthy stuff to be financially savvy.
But with University of California President Janet Napolitano spearheading a new UC initiative to tackle the issue of global hunger, hope might be in sight. A major component of Napolitano’s initiative involves widening students’ access to local produce to promote sustainability on campus, including calling for more content in classrooms on food issues and financing student internships and research projects to study these issues.
Even so, areas of the initiative need improvement, including its failure to consider off-campus students when tackling food sustainability goals.
The disparity in treatment of on- versus off-campus students is particularly prevalent in the section of the initiative that focuses on increasing the amount of local food found in campus dining halls.
The more than 65 percent of UCLA students who live off campus should get the same access to local, affordable produce that their on-campus peers will be getting as a result of Napolitano’s initiative.
This is where the UCLA Food Buying Club comes into play. The club, a project of the UCLA Student Food Collective, gives students and UCLA community members access to affordable, fresh, local produce even when not living on campus.
Members of the Food Buying Club, which includes students and faculty, place orders through the club that are picked up from farmers markets each week and brought back to campus to be distributed. By coordinating orders, the club can place bulk orders, which keep the prices affordable, said Grace Collery, a third-year psychology student and director of the Food Buying Club.
Keeping prices down and being able to compete with Westwood supermarkets is a critical component of the club because it promotes partnerships between the UCLA community and local farmers and vendors. If Ralphs is always the cheaper option, students will have no need or incentive to connect to smaller, local farmers.
These partnerships are encouraged in Napolitano’s new initiative, but can’t be developed or expanded on a large scale unless the club has the proper infrastructure to deal with bulk orders.
Currently, the club has no designated space to set up shop, something other student food collectives, such as the one at UC Berkeley, have. The major goal for the future is to have a location either on campus or in Westwood to operate a student–run grocery, Collery said.
Nurit Katz, chief sustainability officer at UCLA and a member of the UCLA Student Food Collective’s advisory board, has been helping the club work on proposals and business plans to present to the ASUCLA Board of Directors in the hopes of obtaining a physical space to work with. But ASUCLA Food Service Director Cindy Bolton explained that there currently isn’t any free space in Ackerman.
Nonetheless, the administration and ASUCLA should work with students such as those in the UCLA Student Food Collective to expand the reach of student programs like the Food Buying Club. Without the proper infrastructure, which could come in the form of something as simple as a refrigerator to store food, the project cannot feasibly serve our large off-campus population.
A physical store for the Food Buying Club won’t be a fix-all solution, but it represents a feasible project to take on. Much of the UC initiative focuses on the power of research in finding solutions to sustainability issues. And while research is certainly a way for UCLA to contribute to the project, for students not directly involved in this area of study, a student-run food collective allows them to be involved in the issue of sustainability by eliminating the cost barrier.
Some may argue that when a student chooses to live off campus, the university no longer has a responsibility to supply that individual with the same services it provides for those living in the dorms.
But the university shouldn’t shrug off its responsibility to ensure that the entire UCLA community has access to sustainable, local food.
Food is something that literally brings everyone to the table. But until affordability is ruled out as an issue for everyone, not just those living in the dorms, we’ll all “romaine” sitting at different tables, unable to take on Napolitano’s grand sustainability initiative.
Email McCarthy at jmccarthy@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to opinion@media.ucla.edu or tweet us @DBOpinion.