Sustainable Dining
10/6/2009
While high schoolers across the country devoured deep-fried chicken and greasy pizza during lunch on Monday, the students at the Lawrenceville School feasted on penne puttanesca and chicken potpie, made from scratch using locally grown veggies.
The personal mission of the New Jersey boarding school’s Executive Chef Gary Giberson is to curb urban sprawl, support local farmers, reduce carbon footprints and increase cafeteria food's nutritional value. And it's satisfying students’ appetites.
“Mealtimes provide some of the best ways to introduce important ideas about environmentally sound approaches,” Brooks’ Sustainability Director Brian Palm said. “You can consider organic versus industrially prepared food, the amount of embedded carbon in a certain product and determine the distance it traveled to get to your plate. In the end, you can fully assess the impact on your health.”
Giberson has taken a series of small steps to greatly change the approach to Lawrenceville’s dining services since his arrival in 1998. He subsequently launched Sustainable Fare, an independently operated food service and consulting company, in 2007 to help institutions implement sustainable food systems that are environmentally responsible.
“I had a nice advantage of working with a forward-thinking school,” Giberson said of launching his business venture. “An alum, Aldo Leopold, wrote a lot about getting out of the classroom and experiencing nature first hand. I spend a lot of time thinking about how we can be sharing food.”
The consulting chef will arrive on campus Wednesday evening and stay throughout Thursday to discuss dining hall sustainability with a school administrative team and the kitchen staff. He also will discuss his Six Steps of Sustainable Dining during an evening presentation that is open to the public.
“Gary comes to us with significant experience in finding unique, meaningful, and cost effective ways to bring sustainability to meal times at schools like ours,” Palm said. “We’re looking forward to the conversations that this will start.”
Giberson, who is both an American Culinary Federation Certified Executive Chef and a Master Composter, emphasizes the importance of using locally grown, seasonal foods in creating healthy and nutritious meals.
He struggled to develop such menus while working with a national corporate vendor that provided mostly processed and frozen foods. Thus, Giberson sought out his own sustainable food sources while working with environmentally responsible vendors back in 2003. He even hired a local farmer to start harvesting a small portion of the school’s 700 acres.
“I’d come into the office to place all our orders, and it’s hard not to think about where the food is coming from,” Giberson said. “As a chef, you need to reinvent yourself to stay current and six years ago, this is what I did. I decided to create menus around regional food supplies. I thought about what’s in the area and what available. I’ve met more and more people and have become more involved in our local community.”
Giberson recommends other schools like Brooks look at a series of small changes they can make over time to ultimately become more sustainable. Such an approach is often less threatening to naysayers and provides gradual data for improvements.
The executive chef noted that he does pay more for local food suppliers than from a national corporate vendor. However, his overall budget has decreased during the past five years because he’s running a more efficient department.
“When we started looking into things, we found out that a lot of food was being wasted,” Giberson said. “I sat on the waste audit committee and we realized quickly we could be doing better. We tried to analyze and curtail our energy use. We’ve saved a lot by composting. We’re more aware of running water and run the dishwasher less.”
Brooks has already taken several similar measures. Green construction practices minimized the new Science Center's carbon footprint, reducing its potential energy expenditures by 35 percent. Recycled materials are visible throughout the building, along with the living roof, featuring indigenous and drought-tolerant vegetation, that controls storm water runoff and solar panels that generate hot water.
The dining hall went tray-free last fall after Palm’s AP Environmental Science classes tracked the difference in waste levels between using and not using trays. Their tray-free findings: a 72 percent reduction in food and liquid food waste and a 43 percent reduction in solid food waste. Additionally, washing 800 fewer glasses and eliminating one tray per person per meal, 400 to 500 gallons of water was saved, using less dishwashing products and electricity in the process.
Click here to read the full report.
And Brooks was the first prep school in the country to launch TellEmotion’s energy-monitoring software last May, which uses a virtual “bear-o-meter” instead of conventional graphs or numeric figures to report a building’s energy consumption in real-time.
The premise of the animated technology, developed at Dartmouth College, is quite simple: The virtual polar bear is happy and healthy when electricity use is down. But when lights and computers and radios are left running, he eventually crashes through his small patch of melting ice into the freezing waters below.
Click here to learn more about Brooks environmental mascot.
“Brooks is working to take a global issue that can be overwhelming for young people,” Palm said. “We’re taking up the challenge of educating our campus community, making green people to live in green buildings.”
If You Go
What: Sustainable Fare founder Gary Giberson discusses Six Steps of Sustainable Dining
Where: Science Center Forum
When: Thursday, Oct. 8, from 7 to 9 p.m.
How: Free and open to the public.
A leader for Slow Food in Schools, Slow Food USA selected Giberson in 2006 and 2008 to represent the country at the world meeting of food communities for Slow Food. Click here to read an article he wrote for the non-profit’s magazine, "The Snail."