Archived Edition: September 26, 2007 | Back to Current	Sep 09, 2010

Dining Services finds local fare
Sayd Randle and Hillary Batchelder

Few people complain about the ’82 Grill’s pizzas. While comparable in quality to the pies hawked by local vendors, they cost students only a dollar more than a night’s dinner points. Dining Services, however, has a plan to make this year’s product even more appealing than last year’s. Later this week, a team of Dining Services employees will use the College’s new Cryovac and blast freezer machines to preserve 30 cases of locally grown organic peppers, to be used as pizza toppings in place of their mass-produced counterparts.

Under the guidance of local-food-focused director Bob Volpi, the College’s chefs are increasingly shifting to menus built around New England produce bought directly from small vendors. What’s more, technologies like the aforementioned Cryovac machine now allow these items to continue to grace students’ plates until long after the fall harvest is over.

“It’s turning into a way of life around here,” said Mark Thompson, executive chef of Dining Services.

Dining Services has been moving in this direction for years, but the College’s new sustainability goals have led to significant changes in recent months. In addition to buying thousands of plates to help reduce paper product waste at all-campus picnics, Dining Services has fundamentally shifted the way it plans its meals. This fall the chefs at each dining hall have been given a mandate to create their own menus, with the understanding that these plans will be focused around available local items. This venue-based approach is a substantial departure from the way the system used to operate, with all five dining halls on similar six-week rotating schedules of meals. Now, chefs have the agency to experiment based on produce growth calendars, offering more unique seasonal dishes like pumpkin soup with fresh ginger or honey stir-fried Swiss chard.

While changes like this one are immediately visible to students, the shifts in the supply side of the equation may be less obvious. However, recent years have brought significant alterations to the College’s purchasing patterns. While the majority of the College’s food budget is dedicated to large food service conglomerates, with the most business going to Ginsberg’s, a distributor based in the Hudson Valley, each dining hall now has a portion of its budget set aside for local products. According to Volpi, these purchases now comprise 13 to 17 percent of total expenditures, a figure that continues to grow. “I’ve been here for five years, and each year that number’s increased a little bit,” said Molly O’Brien, Greylock unit manager.

The College’s best-known partner in its local foods initiative is Peace Valley Farm, located in Williamstown. Owner Bill Stinson is quick to note the evolution in his farm’s relationship with the College: 30 years ago the College was a place that occasionally bought his surplus crops, while today over 55 percent of his harvests find their way here. All of the field greens and rainbow peppers currently available in the College’s dining halls hail from Peace Valley, and in the coming months Stinson will be providing the bulk of the College’s kale and Swiss chard.

Chefs have cited Stinson as key to the transition to planning their own menus. “I talk to Bill daily,” said Peter Armstrong, head chef at Driscoll. According to Armstrong, these conversations help him and other chefs develop menu options based on fresh fruits and vegetables. The result is a set of menus that reflects the season, with the added bonus of “utilizing butternut squash grown down the road instead of who-knows-where in Florida.”

The relationship between Stinson and the chefs goes beyond mere consultation of what produce they can use on a given day. For instance, last week Driscoll chefs had planned to serve a vegan nutloaf baked in pans, much like its meatier counterpart. But after a conversation with Stinson, Armstrong decided that the nutloaf would instead be baked inside fresh-grown peppers, specially chosen based on their size and shape. As a result of this direct communication, the Driscoll chefs had only to remove the tops and seed the peppers before filling them.

“It’s so important for the chefs to feel involved and connected to a small family farm like ours,” Stinson said. “We have to work harder to get to the students, but it’s worth it.”

Stuart Jones ’08 is one student who has been intimately connected to Peace Valley, acting as a leader in linking the student body to farm. Last summer Jones worked with Peace Valley and Dining Services, picking produce in the fields and also helping create ways to connect the two institutions. At the beginning of the summer, for instance, Jones helped call 100 pounds of chive blossoms that were about to be mowed over to the attention of Thompson and Whitman’s head chef Jerry D’Acchille. As a result, D’Acchille ended up using the blossoms to produce 25 gallons of chive blossom vinegar, which will be used throughout the school year.

Jones believes that the shared vision and commitment to communication between the College and Peace Valley Farm have made way for such positive changes. “The school gets what it wants, and the chefs recognize and appreciate what Bill’s been doing,” Jones says. “Everybody goes through a little bit of extra work so that they can maintain this relationship.”

Peace Valley is not the only farm enjoying a strong relationship with the College. Dining Services records indicate that Williams currently buys from 26 local vendors. Among this group is Highlawn Farm, located in Lee, Mass., which provides all of the College’s milk, except for that served at Grab-n-Go. Thompson is quick to point out that while local and organic, Highlawn’s milk is actually cheaper than what’s available through Ginsberg’s, costing $1.46 rather than $1.56 per half gallon. Flying Pigs Farm, Equinox Farm and the Bennington Apple Barn are also prominent local suppliers.

The College is hoping to strengthen these links in coming months, thanks to the help of new technology. At the moment, the school deals with local farmers on a one-to-one basis, directing inquiries about particular products to individual farms until they find someone who can supply them. In the coming months, however, Massachusetts will likely be launching its version of FarmFresh.org, a Web site that allows Rhode Island schools to search a database of small farms to see who has the items in the volume they need. “It connects them based on what they want, which would be really helpful for us,” said O’Brien, who added that the Massachusetts version of the Web site should kick off within the next few months.

Even the most ardent supporter of local farms will admit that there are limits to how much the College can rely on New England-grown food, largely based on the region’s weather and growing patterns. “We know we can’t do our whole market basket locally,” Volpi said. “Now we’re looking at smaller farms in other places, finding the ones who can provide what we need.” According to Thompson, this kind of background searching has led the College to purchase a greater volume of produce from more upscale distributors Black River and Sid Wainer. These companies draw from farther-away regions, but source a larger percentage of their produce from small farms than Ginsberg’s does.

In addition to looking outward, Dining Services is extending the life of its local products through a phenomenon familiar to any Williams student: cold. Using the Cryovac machine, a blast freezer and a regular freezer, chefs are now freezing vegetables to preserve them for the coming months. D’Acchille said students are already seeing the results of this technology on their plates at Whitman’s, as all marinara sauce the unit is currently using comes from a base produced by 2000 pounds of frozen local tomatoes.

The Dining Services employees interviewed emphasized that these changes represent a beginning more than anything else. “We’re working with this goal in mind, and we’re committed to it,” Volpi said. “I don’t want to buy from a company that doesn’t think the environment is important … and now, the green light’s there to make changes.”