A Growing Passion

A Growing Passion

From students to Regents, Cal colors the campus green.

Raise your hand if you loved the food in your college dining hall. Nobody? No fans of complementary medley—that high-toned euphemism for leftovers? Then you wouldn’t recognize the menu in U.C. Berkeley’s dining facilities today: After a breakfast of eggs, corn tortillas, and jasmine rice, there are grilled chicken quesadillas for lunch; maybe couscous with sweet potatoes, Tunisian vegetable stew, or organic sesame noodles for dinner. Tasty organic food on the table is just part of sweeping environmentally-related change over the past five years that netted U.C. Berkeley a spot on The Princeton Review’s “Green Honor Roll” this summer. Only 14 other colleges in the country made the grade.

As you might expect at the university that launched the Free Speech movement of the Sixties, many of the innovations—campus-wide composting, organic cafeteria food, and energy-efficient construction—stem in large part from the outspoken demand of organized students.

“I came in as a pre-med, and then I got super-involved,” says senior Irene Seliverstov, seated at an outside table at the Free Speech Café, the always-crowded coffeehouse on the first floor of Moffitt Library. Seliverstov’s newfound passion led her to switch to a society and environment major. Today, she intends to pursue a career related to sustainability issues; she also serves as student co-chair of the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on Sustainability, oversees students who “green” campus and building operations, and is helping to craft a water conservation policy for U.C. Berkeley. “I never thought a student could get so involved and be so embraced by staff,” she says. “You could come to a university and not leave a mark, but this has been transforming.”

Salad days: Cal Dining director Shawn LaPean supports Crossroads cafeteria’s organic salad bar, part of the university’s commitment to green practices. Photo by David Wilson.

Seliverstov is just one of hundreds of Berkeley undergraduates recruited as freshmen through residential hall events and seminars to help Cal reduce waste along with energy and water usage. While waste reduction might not have sounded sexy to previous generations, these days the on-campus buzz is all about sustainability. During the first two weeks of fall semester, eager volunteers scramble to sign up for green campus jobs like helping recycling programs run smoothly or working with the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on Sustainability. Others enthusiastically dive into courses like Building Sustainability, offered through the Environmental Sciences department. At times, the excitement level rivals that of rush week.

Sharing Seliverstov’s cafe table today is friend and colleague Sarah Cowan, a third-year art history major who runs the campus’s ReUSE program, which finds new homes for the university’s discarded office equipment. “I get a lot of satisfaction from doing this,” says Cowan. “It allows me to work on a problem—overconsumption—that I really care about. Even when I’m schlepping heavy stuff and getting dirty, I feel like I’m doing something meaningful.”

Between staff, faculty, and students, there’s no dearth of folks at Cal who are interested in sustainability. But sometimes it’s hard for young people to figure out how to harness their energy to the cause. Both Seliverstov and Cowan credit one Cal employee in particular as a source of inspiration and practical advice: Lisa Bauer, manager of campus recycling and refuse services. Bauer, a tall, ebullient woman with graying blond hair whose small, oddly shaped office is under the bleachers at Edwards Track, takes more than a perfunctory interest in her work. In 2001, she helped launch a program to establish student sustainability coordinators in campus residence halls. She also worked to create dorm rooms and apartments temporarily outfitted, at Cal’s expense, with environmentally sound bedding, bean bag chairs, carpets, and hygiene products, along with small informational signs about energy and water usage.

For her vision and commitment, Bauer was named the University of California’s 2009 Sustainability Champion, and specifically recognized for “the education, mentoring, and friendship she has given to countless current and future sustainability leaders.” Students, Bauer is well aware, can be lavish consumers; some, she says, even leave behind brand-new products, with tags on, when they move out at the end of a school year. For better or worse, though, she notes, “The students are the reason we’re here. They go out in the world after they graduate, so if we have any impact on changing their attitudes then we magnify that impact.”

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Any visitor to the Cal campus can see right away that it is a small city unto itself. Nearly 180 acres of lecture halls, research labs, and office buildings, U.C. Berkeley’s central campus is the bustling work and learning place for more than 35,000 students, with nearly the same number again of faculty and staff—in total, nearly the same as the population of the city of Alameda. So when a place that big and complex says, “Jump!” its vendors tend to ask, “How high?”

Such was the case when the directors of Cal Dining, which operates campus residential dining facilities, retail food markets, and cafes, decided to drop all transfats from the food sold in campus dining halls and retail outlets. “We put our vendors on notice, and those that weren’t transfat-free came off our shelves,” says Michael Laux, assistant director of Cal Dining. But some suppliers, aware that they would soon be required to list any transfats in their products on labels, immediately changed their recipes. Others, including those who sold black beans, doughnuts (both the batter and the frying oil), dim sum, and prepared sandwiches, eliminated transfats specifically at the request of Cal Dining.

The giant university system’s weighty influence is not limited to food. When the statewide U.C. system committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, for example, overnight it became the seventh largest institutional purchaser of renewable energy in the country.

But being big isn’t synonymous only with major clout; a supersized institution also creates major headaches when it comes to dealing with stuff that is discarded. During the 2008-09 academic year, Cal generated nearly 122,000 tons of garbage—including recyclable and compostable waste. That unusually high number (the campus’s average usually hovers around 9,000 tons), Bauer explains, comes from a new definition of campus waste, which now includes the rubble from demolished buildings. Bauer, whose conservative European parents scolded her never to throw anything away, keeps a close eye on students’ sometimes-wasteful habits, even peeking into Dumpsters as she strolls around campus. She’ll call building managers if she finds recyclables being thrown out.

In 2003, when one of the campus’s largest dining facilities, Crossroads, was being rebuilt from the ground up using environmentally friendly design, Bauer dropped a typically pointed hint to Shawn LaPean, director of Cal Dining. “She said, ‘You know your new facility, Crossroads? You should see if you can get it Green Business Certified,” LaPean recalls. “Then all of a sudden we were being recognized by the County and people got excited. It seems as though every time we do something green, business picks up.”

It may seem strange for the director of a university dining service to worry about business, but there’s a lot of competition for student dollars when it comes to food. Only students who live in Cal’s residential halls (currently 5,800) are required to buy campus meal plans, so LaPean tracks how well business is going the same way any restaurant owner does: He looks at the receipts. This year, nearly 3,000 additional students bought optional meal plans. “Students come to Berkeley highly critical of food,” LaPean says. “For them to choose to buy the meal plan, we must be doing something right.”

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Eating at Cal started to change when Crossroads opened in 2003. The massive food court between Channing and Haste streets replaced a seismically unsafe dining hall for Residential Halls One and Two. The first campus building certified as green by Alameda County, Crossroads is designed to maximize natural light, with a speckled concrete floor, windows that rise up two stories, and metal beams spanning the length of the interior. These innovations mean that for many of the 23 hours a day that Crossroads is open, electric lights can be turned off or down.

Gastronomically speaking, the eatery’s centerpiece is the organic salad bar. Three years ago, just six months after he was hired as Cal Dining’s executive chef, Chuck Davies decided to expand organic offerings beyond the predictable handful of veggies. “At first we thought, ‘Okay, we can buy some organic things,’” says Davies. “But that just didn’t feel like it had enough integrity. There are standards that hold manufacturers and producers to a different level. My feeling was that people who serve the products should be held to standards as well.” So why not, he proposed, go whole hog and seek certification for an entire line of organic foods.

Easier said than done, perhaps. The National Organic Program, issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, requires food labeled as organic to meet strict requirements. Regulations also apply to retail food establishments that serve organic food. All in all, the complicated process of “organ-icizing” Crossroads took over a year, involving extensive research, application procedures, and even setting up a separate kitchen area, where approved pest control and washing products could be used.

Davies worked with Lorraine Aguilar, then a senior in Cal’s Nutritional Science and Toxicology department, to complete an extensive application to California Certified Organic Farmers, the Santa Cruz–based organic certification organization. The two made maps of the kitchen and dining areas, outlining how staff would clean equipment, food prep stations, and storage areas, and keep organic products away from countertops, dishes, or utensils that came into contact with non-organic products.

Today, the fruits of their labors are readily apparent in the Crossroads kitchen, where one large corner is devoted to storing and preparing organic food. In the walk-in fridge, green “Organic” stickers adorn bins of lettuce, carrots, and eggs. On a long stainless steel counter, jumbo food processors, blenders, and cooking pans sport the same labels.

“It’s like keeping kosher,” says Laux. “When we get inspected, they want to see if we’re truly doing everything we say we’re doing.”

Today, all four on-campus salad bars—Crossroads, Foothill Food Court, Café 3, and CKC Dining—are 100 percent organic. Veggies, pasta salads, soy bacon bits, nuts, and tofu that rest in iced stainless steel pans come from local organic farms. The hardest item to find was organic salad dressing, but that problem was solved handily when a Haas Business School graduate, Rachel Kruse, opened Organicville in Richmond and began selling organic dressings. Cal Dining also uses only organic eggs and milk.

But upgrading to organic, like any sweeping change, involves more than meets the eye. At Cal, for example, there was the tough logistical issue presented by additional trucks delivering organic produce to Crossroads’s Haste Street loading dock—a small structure already crowded with a huge trash compactor, biodiesel tank, recycling dumpster, and a fleet of green compost bins waiting for pickup. And finding a vendor willing to pick up produce from separate local farms and deliver to campus was really the “tipping point to going full-fledge organic,” says LaPean.

But the effort paid off: the changes, LaPean says, seem to appeal to students—even students who don’t consider themselves environmentalists.

The proof is in the pudding—or in this case, in the dining hall. Sure enough, “staunch Republican” and freshman business major Daniel Ryan, eagerly lining up for a serving of rice and orange-glazed chicken, says he doesn’t recycle and isn’t “green-conscious” at all. “I do things that save me money,” Ryan says. “Those curly lightbulbs save money on energy, so I use them.” But Ryan admits that he is glad U.C. is making an effort to be environmentally responsible. “Even if I don’t care, somebody else does,” he says. “I definitely appreciate it.”

At the salad bar, first-year engineering student Andrew Yu helps himself to a small plate of organic spinach and mushrooms. “We’re in an age of technology but we’re also in an age of mass consumption,” he says. “It’s great that a big university like Berkeley is taking the initiative to do something about these issues, rather than just talking about it.”

At Crossroads, though, it’s not just about the food on the table; what happens after the meal matters, too. That’s why compost and recycling bins are placed prominently near the dishwashing room, with food scraps and paper napkins deposited into one container and non-compostables into another. The diner’s final responsibility is to place their tray on a revolving rack that circles into the dishroom. There, workers in aprons scrape any leftover food into more compost bins—you won’t find a single garbage disposal on the premises—before stacking plates into a loud, steamy dishwasher.

“We could be more subtle about this stuff, but [we] call it what it is,” says Laux. “Put the food in the compost bin.” The trays here, Laux notes, are half as big as traditional cafeteria trays, to reduce the amount of wasted food. While a good idea in theory, this change can make juggling plates difficult.

Student Yara Alas struggles to maneuver two large oval-shaped plates on the small tray. Being environmentally aware “takes a little getting used to,” she says, noting that she and her roommate keep separate trash cans for recycling and garbage. But like many of her peers, Alas believes it’s important to make the extra effort. “I don’t want the environment to deteriorate from all the garbage and pollution,” she says.

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Students asked for organic food in the dining hall, and they got it. They also pushed the U.C. system to make a bigger commitment to the environment—and got it.

In 2002, a student movement organized by Greenpeace succeeded in convincing U.C. Regents to adopt a policy on sustainable practices. Initially, the policy focused on green building design and clean energy standards. Today, the expanded protocol has seven components, including one addressing recycling and waste management goals (U.C. has, for example, vowed to send zero garbage to the landfill by 2020).

Over this past academic year, Cal diverted almost half of its refuse and recycling away from the dump. (When you include the demolished building rubble, it diverted about 95 percent.) And with its recent dining hall innovations, the university should be ahead of the game in implementing a planned policy addition concerning sustainable food systems. So far, in other words, so good.

“I felt I was pushing a ball up the hill on my own for quite a while,” Bauer says. “But when that policy passed, I knew that U.C. would take it seriously in spite of the additional costs and staff time. Higher education is where sustainability is being pushed in a big way, like movements of the 1970s.”

One of the students involved in crafting the initial policy in 2002 was Matthew St. Clair, then a graduate student in environmental policy who was active in the student-led movement. Earlier, staff at the U.C. president’s office had tried and failed to push a similar policy through for approval by the U.C. Board of Regents. But, St. Clair says, “The students as customers of the system have power that the staff don’t have. We went directly to the Board with a resolution. We knew that it’d be hard but that we could do it.”

It wasn’t just a matter of principle: the Greenpeace coalition stood to score a huge and very tangible victory for their cause. With an $18 billion budget and 180,000 employees, the U.C. system is one of the state’s largest employers. It also provides housing and meal plans for many of its more than 220,000 students, making it a huge consumer muscle—spending between $2 and $3 billion a year on goods and services.

The student’s struggle was a bit like a well-organized flock of lambs moving a lion—but well worth the effort. “I went to various congressional hearings and heard California evoked repeatedly as an example,” recalls St. Clair, whose résumé includes a stint with Friends of the Earth in Eastern Europe and as a national energy legislation intern in Washington, D.C. “Since California is seen as a leader, if U.C. does something to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it’d be something that other universities around the country would see as a model.”

Starting in 2003, the student group finally saw the fruits of their labors, with the U.C. Board of Regents approving the policy on sustainable practices and pledging to reduce system-wide greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. The 10 campuses also vowed to adopt principles of energy efficiency and sustainability in construction, to purchase green power, and to invest in local renewable energy sources. Since then, U.C. has implemented energy-efficiency projects that will save an estimated $12 million annually, winning both state and national awards and recognition.

As for St. Clair, he’s now sustainability manager for the entire U.C. system.

“It was new for me to be co-opted and hired on,” he says, grinning. “I’ve definitely had the perspective of being on both sides now—the ones pushing for change and the ones implementing it. We’ve made a lot of progress. I’ve been surprised and amazed at how much students care.”

From Lisa Bauer’s point of view, students like St. Clair deserve most of the credit for pushing U.C. to make sustainability a priority.

“This is the kind of thing the administration may not always look forward to, but I’m happy to say that the students were smart enough to craft these policies so that they stuck,” Bauer says. “The Regents got it.”

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Kate Rix is an Oakland-based writer and former Monthly editor.

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