Number Time!

It’s number time (and here I thought I’d never have to do math again at Brown)! In addition to cataloging the experience of eating locally as we have in previous posts, we thought that it was also extremely important to do our best to estimate approximately how long it would take an average Brown student to eat locally. Considering how busy most of us are, it’s simply not practical if it takes significantly longer than eating in dining halls.

Our times are below. Please note that our calculations for our procurement of the local food is based off of the assumption that people eating locally would obtain their food for the entire week with these shopping trips, and thus despite only eating locally for one day, we divided our time spent shopping by seven in order to achieve a more relevant calculation for the time spent daily (though in reality it would be likely broken up into bigger chunks over the course of a week).

When recording the time for our day of eating locally, we included all of our prep, consumption, and clean up time. When recording the time for the Dining hall food, we included the time spent in line, eating the food, clean up, and travel time to the Dining hall, in order to ensure a focus on the entire food experience.

Local Procurement

Market Shares: 3 minutes

Farmer’s Market: 17 minutes

Extra grocery shopping time: 9 minutes

Local Eating

Breakfast: 15 minutes

Lunch: 30 minutes

Dinner: 90 minutes

Local Total: 164 minutes

Dining Hall Food

Breakfast: 20 minutes

Lunch: 60 minutes

Dinner: 50 minutes

Dining Total: 130 minutes

After doing the math (thank God for calculators!), it appears that eating locally would take (on average) an extra 34 minutes a day, or 26% more time than eating in the dining halls. Overall, while not insignificant, that difference is not incredibly significant. As I mentioned before, Brown students, while busy, likely do have an extra 34 minutes daily to devote to their food. Considering all the benefits of local eating, it doesn’t seem like too much of a sacrifice, especially given that the extra time can easily be spent with friends, either as a part of a trip to a farmer’s market, or cooking or cleaning up together. Those extra 34 minutes aren’t wasted time, but time spent working together, laughing, and thinking just a little bit more about how food gets onto your plate.

It’s also worth noting that there are countless ways in order to cut down that time, if one was so obliged! Nora and I just did one day of eating locally, but it wouldn’t have been hard at all to have cooked a dinner that took less time. Or, to rotate cooking and cleaning up dinner with friends, so you only have to devote the prep time once or twice a week! Another option is cooking larger portions, and freezing (or just refrigerating) leftovers.

There are a lot of ways to shrink the (already pretty small) time gap between eating locally and eating in dining halls (as estimated by our project). But honestly, based on our calculations, at least time wise, eating locally would be pretty feasible for most.