Montana dining consolidates sustainability efforts

The University of Montana (UM) Dining has introduced a new program called Just Eats that aims to expand its approach to sustainability by bringing together various initiatives across the department to address issues related to the social, environmental and economic aspects of the food system. 

“What’s new about this primarily is that it’s taking a really direct and holistic view of what sustainability is to our department,” says Trevor Lowell, UM Dining’s director of sustainability. “So we’re looking at all of our business practices, all the decisions we make and the ways we interact with guests and try to bake sustainability into all those areas.”

Excess kitchen food production is donated to the Missoula Food Bank’s Food Circle program, where it is repackaged into ready-to-eat, heat and serve meals.

Often, he adds, “sustainability is sort of looked at as mitigation work—we have these impacts and how can we address them—but we want to broaden that to be more proactive.”

The new program takes on issues across the food system through six targeted subject areas: agriculture, food access, menus, procurement, education and waste.

Many of individual programs impact multiple areas and Just Eats is designed to maximize the impact of each across as many areas as possible. For example, the recently introduced Dollar Coffee Club helps reduce waste by incentivizing the use of reusable mugs, but it is also used to raise money for a sustainability scholarship fund through its membership fee.

The UM Dining campus gardens include beehives to pollinate the crops and produce honey for the program.

Just Eats also incorporates long-standing initiatives such as UM Dining’s Farm to College Program, which in the last 15 years has invested over $9 million in Montana’s agricultural economy through its local procurement practices. Meanwhile, for products that can’t be sourced locally, UM Dining created the UMD Sustainable program, which ensures that products such as coffee, fish and chocolate are sourced from companies that use responsible practices and are certified by independent third-party organizations.

The department itself operates two produce gardens as well as honeybee hives and an indoor microgreen operation on campus, which not only provide thousands of pounds of fresh organic produce to the dining operations but also serve as learning laboratories for students and visitors, including groups of schoolchildren. Both gardens are working models of sustainable food production systems that incorporate a variety of growing techniques and practices to grow high-quality produce and healthy soils.

A recent addition is six Welsh Harlequin laying ducks that are expected to eventually produce eggs for use in the dining operation.

UM Dining gardens serve both practical purposes—they supply thousands of pounds of organic produce to the program—and educational ones, both for UM students and for the larger Missoula community, including groups of schoolchildren.

UM Dining also supports a variety of educational opportunities for students through internships and employment that provide them with valuable experience in everything from culinary skills and menu design to permaculture gardening, nutrition and local food procurement.

“It becomes more than just a college job,” Lowell says.​ “It becomes part of a career path.”

UM Dining has also partnered with the Western Montana Growers Cooperative to establish a workplace CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) program on campus so that students, faculty and staff can order CSA shares and have them delivered to campus once a week throughout the summer and fall. The initiative both supports local growers and gives the campus community access to fresh, locally grown produce.

Of course, the core of the program is the menus served at the campus dining sites. Those menus are built around scratch cooking using tons of fresh fruits, vegetables and high-quality proteins while avoiding processed foods that are high in added sodium and sugar. UM Dining is actively working to promote more plant-forward diets that leave smaller environmental footprints and are generally regarded as better for human health.​ As part of this commitment, the department is a partner in the Menus of Change research collaborative.

In the area of waste reduction, UM Dining uses LeanPath software to track food waste in its kitchens. Any excess prepared food is donated to the Missoula Food Bank’s Food Circle program, where it is repackaged into ready-to-eat, heat and serve meals.

To reduce waste in its dining outlets, UM Dining implemented trayless dining in its main dining center—producing a 60 percent reduction in post-consumer food waste at the site—and promotes the use of reusable containers whenever possible, such as with the Dollar Coffee Club program and with a To-Go program that lets guests use reusable clamshell containers to bring food out of the Food Zoo Dining Center.

Also, single-use packaging is being reduced as much as possible, and where it can’t be avoided, compostable products are prioritized.

To manage the waste that is generated, UM Dining composts all pre- and post-consumer waste from Food Zoo, as well as all the used coffee grounds from its coffee operations. The waste is pulped, dehydrated and then hauled to the PEAS (Program in Ecological Agriculture & Society) Farm, a 10-acre working organic farm located two miles from campus that is operated by UM’s Environmental Studies Program. There, it is incorporated into their windrow compost piles. Finished compost from the PEAS farm is then used to fertilize the UM Dining gardens. The farm is also where used fryer oil is sent, to be converted into bio-diesel.

A lot of this has been ongoing, but disconnected from each other and in some cases underdeveloped as to its potential to effect change in other areas, says Camp Howard, director of UM Dining.

“I’ve been here about a year and one thing I noticed is that UM Dining has been doing a tremendous job throughout the years in all sorts of sustainability practices,” he explains. “But one of the things I though was missing was just putting everything under one umbrella so we could easily tell the story and talk about what our program is because it is so complex and has so many different things happening in it. With Just Eats, we’re now doing that.”