Tying Up Loose Ends and a New Journey

Overall, Nora and I had an absolutely fabulous time exploring the feasibility of eating locally at Brown University with you, and I sincerely hope that through our efforts, we’ve made it easier for our average reader to locavore it up!

In this blog, we’ve outlined couple fantastic options for getting local food on campus, and given links to a few more.

We’ve shared our experiences eating purely locally, hopefully providing an example of what eating locally – even in the beginning of winter – can look like.

We also talked about something many of our readers are probably more intimately experienced with – eating food from Brown Dining Xervices. We hope that our reflections on both have been as helpful to you, our readers in critically thinking about where their food comes as they have been for us.

Then, we outlined the impacts of eating locally. We started with the impact that eating locally has on our lives as students. Happily, we found that overall, eating locally is actually cheaper than eating in the dining hall, and takes only slightly longer on average. Yay!

Then, after some intense investigative work, we were able to also determine our approximate carbon footprints from eating each day. It’s important to note that our estimates were based off Hootroot.com, which, while a great tool, doesn’t take into account issues of scale of transport into calculating the carbon footprint. Additionally, we weren’t able to obtain exact locations of where our food comes from. When reading this part of our blog, we suggest that you look at the calculations more as a starting point to start thinking about the miles your food travels, rather than as concrete data. The idea – that we should be cognizant of how far our food travels to our plates – is the important part.  

Then, taking into account our experience and research, we came up with a list of 7 food rules, that will guide our own food experiences, as well as (hopefully) our readers.

Before starting this post, I originally wanted to title it “Well, that’s all folks”, ‘cause that’s the kind of corny guy I am. But, after starting to reflect, I realized that it’s really not. The class that sparked this project is over, yes, but that doesn’t mean that the tenets that guided this project are. When approaching this project, our goal was to add to the environmentalist movement by making it easier for members of the Brown community to tap into the local food movement. In that, I think that we were very successful. But, in order to create a successful blog, we obviously had to focus on some areas over others.

Thus, there are aspects of the local food movement that definitely warrant additional exploration. One is the debate about the effectiveness of the movement. While Nora and I have done a significant amount of informal research while completing this project, we could definitely benefit from exploring more closely at some of the questions that critics bring up, including issues with scale in transportation, focusing so much on local food and ignoring the issues of environmental justice that come from more common agricultural practices in our country, and the question of expanding the local food movement to a more regional school of thought.

Additionally, another area worthy of exploration is the connection between the food and those who produce it. While we were definitely much closer with our food on our local day in comparison to eating in dining services, we still don’t know as much as we should about those who produced our food.

This ties into the idea of the world of food not being black and white. Just because a food item is local, doesn’t mean it was humanely produced, doesn’t mean it’s organic or pesticide free, doesn’t mean it has a lower carbon footprint, and doesn’t mean the workers were treated fairly.

Thus, though this blog is ending, my – our – journey isn’t. Food isn’t something that you can avoid, and its impacts on our lives and the environment are gigantic. This is a journey we must all take together, and, even though I won’t be regularly blogging about it, I really hope it's one you’ll continue to join us on. 

If you have any thoughts we'd love to hear them in the comments.