Bowdoin Dining is making locavores of us all with its commitment to promote sustainability by providing food from local vendors.
On Wednesday, Moulton Union and Thorne Hall each featured a menu of local Maine foods in order to call attention to Bowdoin’s commitment to environmental sustainability and the locavore movement, which urges people to consume food that is produced locally—rather than transported across long distances—to increase environmental sustainability and reduce carbon footprints.
Additionally, Bowdoin appointed a Sourcing and Menu Manager, Jonathan Holmes, whose position includes outreach to local farmers to increase the number of locally-grown items served in the dining halls.
Dining’s “Feed the Farmer Fridays” invite local farmers to lunch at Thorne to cultivate a relationship between local producers and Bowdoin’s own dining services.
Bowdoin Dining recently started working with Salt and Sea, a local fourth-generation community-supported fishery to provide Acadian Redfish in the dining halls. Redfish, a Gulf of Maine product, is an underutilized species, so it is very plentiful on the Maine coast. Local fisheries like Salt and Sea are trying to create a market for the redfish bicatch, as it is a local and sustainable species.
However, while Dining has been increasing its efforts to promote local food, it continues to import products based on seasonal availability, price and sustainability. Because quotas have been reduced to maintain fish stock in Maine thanks to overfishing, Bowdoin has had to turn elsewhere for certain seafood products.
Dining Services recently began working with North Atlantic Seafood, Inc., a seafood company based in Bali, Indonesia, that buys fish from local fisherman and processes it in Indonesia before sending it via ship to the U.S. Though it may seem ecologically unfriendly, a shipment from Indonesia via boat has a smaller carbon footprint that a truckload of goods from California.
“[Students] want sustainable this, sustain- able that, but the reality is we don’t have pineapple in Maine. We try to give as many students as many choices as possible by having a little bit of everything for everybody” said Holmes .