Real Food both the mission and the approach at Sterling College

Sterling College in Craftsbury Common, Vt. is not your typical college. Rather than the multidisciplinary approach of most higher ed institutions, it focuses on a single mission—environmental stewardship—and offers environmentally focused bachelor’s degrees in only five areas: ecology, environmental humanities, sustainable agriculture, sustainable food systems and outdoor education.

The tiny school—enrollment is only 135—practices in its campus dining operation what it preaches in its academics as the program has now topped the Real Food Challenge’s college rankings for the third consecutive year.

The Real Food Challenge score is based on a review of all the food used in the Sterling kitchen in the 2015-2016 academic year, a review that concluded that 65 percent of that food met the organization’s Real Food qualifications for production methods.

Contributing mightily to that was the fact that 53 percent of Sterling’s food came from farms within a 150-mile radius of the campus. In fact, 35 percent was from even closer than that as it was sourced from the college’s own 130-acre farm/garden complex where the students grow crops and manage livestock, including cattle, hogs, chickens and turkeys. There’s also an edible forest garden, hoop houses and even a sugarhouse and sugarbush for maple syrup production.

Campus dining at Sterling is communal, with the food—almost all of it scratch-made—served buffet style. Though the choices are necessarily somewhat limited, the meals always include a salad option and alternate versions of the main dish to accommodate different diet regimens as, for example, meatballs made with chickpeas as a meatless alternative when traditional meatballs are on the menu.

Currently, a crew of four full-time kitchen staffers is handling menu planning and operations while Sterling looks for a new executive chef.

That chef will have responsibility for creating a menu influenced largely by what is available locally, especially from the onsite farm.

Those meal offerings also need to be varied enough to satisfy a student population drawn from not just around the U.S. but internationally, and one that has few other off-campus dining options in the immediate, sparsely populated area. Meal diversity is assisted somewhat by occasional “kitchen takeovers” during which groups of students prepare a special meal for their peers based on their own backgrounds.

Whatever is served better be filling because there is scant danger of any “freshman 15” epidemic on this campus.

“This is a work college and we have students out there in the wood lot all morning, doing forest management or sugaring or working with the horses or clearing trails,” observes Nicole Civita, assistant director of the school’s Rian Fried Center for Sustainable Agriculture & Food Systems, “so when they come in they need to eat and we have to meet their needs.”

They also have to do the dishes: as part of their academic requirements, students not only work the farm and garden but each must also put in at least one week of dish chores per semester.

In accordance with Sterling’s environmental stewardship mission, food waste is minimal and treated in the most ecologically sustainable way possible. All appropriate pre-consumer waste from the kitchen gets set aside and fed to the pigs, and the rest is composted. As for any prepared food left unserved during meal times, well, Sunday night is leftover night.

One benefit Sterling’s new executive chef will have is a fully renovated kitchen that was just finished, thanks to donations and a matching grant from the USDA. It includes brand-new production equipment such as a 10-burner stove, tilt skillet, two-deck convection oven, charbroiler and griddle, all of which increase the variety of dishes the kitchen can now produce.

The newly equipped kitchen also assists in the academic mission—Civita has already used it for a class on cultural food appropriation—and as a small business incubator. Aspiring entrepreneurs from the area “will now have access to a licensed kitchen where can work with some of our upper level food systems students on developing their business plans,” she notes.

Sterling’s production of 35 percent of its food in 2015-2016 on its own grounds was a substantial leap from the previous year, when the number was only 20 percent. The difference, Civita says, is the increased use of meat raised on the farm, including its own poultry and hogs. Sterling also purchases older cows near the end of their lactation lives from area dairy farms and grazes them for a season to prepare them for slaughter, which is done at a nearby commercial processing plant.

Though ethical farm butchery and on-farm slaughters do take place as part of the teaching process at the college, the meat from these activities is not used in the meal program.

Despite the impressive proportion of its food needs Sterling supplies from its own farm, onsite production remains primarily an academic activity that has priority even over maximizing Real Food Challenge numbers.

“Our participation in the Real Food Challenge is about more than just trying to score ourselves,” Civita explains. “We do push ourselves a couple percentage points each year—it’s sort of built into the DNA of this place—but we don’t set a percentage goal for on-farm production because our farm is first and foremost an educational farm. It has to be a space for teaching, which means it has to be a space for experimentation and modeling of a variety of systems, many of which are not going to be necessarily as productive or as efficient [as they might be].”

That teaching mission has produced students who have taken a liking to the local farming life, and Civita is proud to note that several have become local producers, including one that now supplies the “vast majority” of the college’s milk needs.

Nor does the farm operation want to compete excessively with local producers, she adds, “so we’re trying to work really collaboratively with them. We’ve had the benefit of creating direct buying relationships with farmers in the area who will do direct ordering with us. We will sometimes talk to local producers about what it is we’re missing and try to think about whether it is something we should take a prior hand at producing, or whether it is something that they can produce for us, and that [approach has] been very successful in the past.”

As an example, most of the eggs currently used in the meal program are purchased from outside but an effort is underway in one of the animal science classes to raise chicks that might start augmenting the supply sometime in the future.

“Our work here is mission-tied and we’re also a work college, so our students perform meaningful and necessary work on the farm, in the kitchen and across the campus in various capacities,” summarizes Civita. “We conceive of our dining hall as an educational space as we are teaching agricultural food systems and living in community. We put so much emphasis on our foodservice because it is connected to all the other parts of what we do here as a mission driven institution.”