The Commons tries to ensure that a portion of food served comes from Oregon farmers
By James Baggett
Serving mass amounts of food to hungry college students is quite a challenge. Doing this while upholding ethical standards towards the local economy, environment, and student health is an even greater challenge.
As you can probably guess, there is a lot more to The Commons than the servers who put the prepared food onto your plate. The process to feed this amount of people requires 40 or so employees working as a team. The first employees begin baking and making breakfast everyday at 5:15 a.m.
Communication is key to the process of delivering food to the students, according to James Green, executive chef. There is no set structure or menu. Employees work together to make sure that everything is accomplished.
At dinner alone, The Commons might serve almost 1,000 meals, according to Green.
Fortunately, unlike many cafeterias, The Commons makes everything from scratch with fresh meat and produce, much of it from Northwest farms. Green cites this as the challenge of The Commons: to use fresh, local and organic food from sustainable sources.
"Our staff is well-educated on sustainability," said General Manager Kirk Mustain.
Last week, Bon Appétit spent $13,000 on produce for The Commons, and $7,300 of this was fruits and vegetables purchased directly from local organic farms, Green said.
"We're not opening packs of lasagna or cans of peas," cook James Pirsch said.
This becomes clear upon inspection. The freezers are small and the refrigerators are packed with locally grown fruits and vegetables. Only the citrus, avocados and pineapples come from somewhere other than the Northwest, according to Green.
Even the meat is from local sources.
"We have a local fisherman, pork producer and lamb producer," Green said.
Oregon Country Beef supplies all the beef. This is a community of cattle ranchers committed to sustainable ranching. Its meat is hormone and antibiotic free.
All eggs from The Commons are purchased from farms that are Certified Humane. This means that the chickens have been raised with space to move, sufficient nutrients and shelter from weather.
Every day, 120 dozen cookies are made from scratch using flour from sustainable farms in Eastern Washington. The bakery in The Commons uses about 1,000 pounds of this flour each week.
All butter and milk products are from Sunshine Dairy, an rBST-free dairy farm. The synthetic hormone rBST is often injected in cows to increase milk productivity.
This year, many of the student complaints received by The Commons staff are that the portion sizes have gotten too small. There are reasons for this besides the large freshman class.
"You know what, Americans are fat. Students will thank us when they're 40 and their bellies aren't too big. We're creating good habits," chef Ken Clemens said.
And the cooks themselves are holding to their own standards. "You won't see the cooks with a mound of food like before," Clemens added.
Bon Appétit Management Company, which owns all food services at UP, strives to support locally managed food products, many of them organic. Bon Appétit was founded by Fedele Bauccio, a 1966 graduate UP.
Eating organically raised produce and meats is becoming increasingly popular in the U.S. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that the organic industry has grown 20 percent per year over the last seven years. American consumers are increasingly believing that there are benefits in sustainable and chemical free agriculture.
