A healthy hunger on all college campuses
Hamilton college looking to boost local food procurement
Hamilton’s Mohawk College is leading a two-year project aimed at uniting all 24 Ontario colleges with a common model for local food procurement.
“We’re looking at how can we find ways to support regional economies, improve student experience and enhance the overall sustainability of campus food services,” says Alan Griffiths, manager of sustainability at the college.
With a $100,000 grant from the Greenbelt Fund, the project is expected to increase local food sales at three Ontario colleges by $1.5 million over two years.
Sustainability has been a strategic direction at Mohawk for years, Griffiths says.
He cites an educational approach built around “the three Ps”: production, preparation and procurement.
“I can teach a student to grow a garden, but if they can’t prepare the food, they aren’t likely to. I can teach a student how to grow something and how to cook it, but I also need to teach them how to buy it.”
The Mohawk team consulted with stakeholders, from farmers and food-service providers to students and college food-purchasing staff.
The project lead, Kate Flynn, is a local farmer who grows on two acres in the Hamilton area.
The goal is to identify the common barriers that make it difficult to get local food into the system and then develop procedures to knock them down.
“There are about six to 10 common issues,” Griffiths says, “which we will detail in a report in February.”
Pilot projects will then kick in with some of the colleges to test new approaches and inform the creation of a step-by-step guide that all the col- leges can use to amp up their local food game. The guide will be released in November at the Ontario College Local Food Summit.