Spreading the gospel of locally-grown

Recent graduate Louella Hill works with Dining Services to help sustainable farming practices take root on campus.

by Wendy Y. Lawton

It started with the apples, crisp Cortlands and Macs from a Massachusetts orchard. Then came the local peaches and peppers, basil and squash. Then the farmer's market arrived on Wriston Quad. Now, there is Roots & Shoots at the Ratty.

Grab a tray, stand in line and consider the red potato frittata, the vegan Cuban black beans, the bruschetta bar, the Tofu Pups, the pearl onions aswim with the peas. The new serving line showcases healthy dishes often made with produce grown less than 50 miles from The College Green. It is possible that some of the peas - or corn or tomatoes - were even picked by a Brown student or secretary or even the University's head chef.

Roots & Shoots is the latest sign of Brown's burgeoning commitment to locally-grown food. With Harvard making its own organic marinara, Stanford buying produce from a local co-op and farms sprouting up at places like the University of New Hampshire, Oberlin College and Yale, Brown is right in step with the sustainable food movement sweeping campuses across the country. The movement, which encompasses everything from composting to community gardening, stresses practices that are environmentally friendly and socially just.

At Brown, the march toward fresh seasonal food started two years ago. A group of students came to the office of Virginia Dunleavy, associate director of Dining Services, and asked that the University start pouring fair trade coffee. Too expensive, Dunleavy said, but what else could Brown do? Community Harvest, a program to purchase more food from regional farms, was born. And those local apples arrived, heaped in dining hall baskets. Consumption doubled.

But when you serve 1.5 million meals a year, buying food from small farms poses a logistical challenge. The effort may have withered on the vine if it weren't for Louella Hill, a 23-year-old farm-loving foodie who stood over the seedling idea with a watering can.

"Louella," Dunleavy said, "keeps us going."

A 2004 grad with pale green eyes and a peaceful, purposeful manner, Hill (left) has made locally-grown her gospel - and has become the sustainable food movement's beating heart at Brown.

Hill serves as food system consultant to Brown Dining Services, a role that includes organizing the Wednesday farmer's market, leading students and staff on farm tours and picking excursions, and promoting sustainable agriculture to students. Hill's main task: Increase the amount and variety of local foods served in dining halls. Hill finds interested farmers, finds out what is fresh, and coordinates orders and deliveries.

That's the job on paper.

In reality, it means working with chefs on menus, hand-painting signs for Roots & Shoots and the farmer's market, attending Oxfam meetings, penning columns for the Brown Daily Herald, and standing in an open field explaining brussel sprout production to a staffer. Hill has logged hundreds of miles in the Center for Environmental Studies' 15-passenger natural gas van to visit farmers in places like Lincoln and Little Compton. Their gifts - rutabagas, peaches, cabbages - spill through the hallways of her Providence apartment. There is usually dirt under her fingernails.

"Food and farms," she says simply, "are my passion."

It was always this way. In fourth grade, Hill got a Betty Crocker cookbook and started working through the recipes. At 14, she arrived at the back door of Cafe Roka, a gourmet restaurant in her hometown of Bisbee, Ariz., with a mocha mousse cheesecake. She asked for a job as a pastry chef. She got a job - as a salad-maker - and worked her way up the kitchen line during high school, learning how to make perfect risotto cakes and how to properly caramelize a cr�me brulee.

During her junior year at Brown, Hill took a year off to work on an organic sheep farm in Tuscany, where she learned to make pecorino cheeses. With its local wine, artisan cheese and fresh produce, Italy was an epiphany. Food wasnÕt trucked in or flown in, it was often grown or made by a neighbor. This got Hill thinking about her life back at Brown: "What about Rhode Island? What do the farms produce? Where does the food go?"

When Hill returned to campus, she set out to find answers. The result is "Localizing the Foodshed," her environmental studies honors thesis. Through her research, Hill learned that the number of Rhode Island farms dropped from more than 3,000 in 1930 to 730 in 2003. Many local crops, such as grass seed, arenÕt even edible. The result: Only 10 percent of food New Englanders eat is grown in New England.

"We don't have to go to Italy to eat great local food," she said. "We have it all in Rhode Island. We have open space for farms. And we have interest in fresh seasonal food. We need a system, the infrastructure, to make it happen."

This year, Hill won a $10,000 grant from the Environmental Protection Agency to create a Web site that will help get more local food on the campus menu. Critical information from farmers - selection, quantity, price, packaging - will be entered into the site. Dining Services staff can then search by keyword to fill orders. Ivo Piskov, a 29-year-old computer science student writing the software, said that eventually, farmers will enter information on their own. (Until they all get computers, Hill will do data entry.) And if it's successful, the site can be used by other Rhode Island institutions interested in buying seasonal produce. Piskov expects an early version to be running by Oct. 1.

But Peter Rossi, assistant director of Dining Services, said logistics are just one hurdle for buying fresh food. Local produce can be more expensive. It is, for obvious reasons, scarce in winter and spring. And unlike hothouse offerings, local produce isnÕt uniform Ð think of a lumpy, yellow heirloom tomato - so it may not always appeal to students.

Yet Rossi said his office is committed to seasonal fare. Rossi expects to order hundreds of pounds of local herbs, fruits and vegetables this year for use at the Ratty and Verney-Woolley dining halls. With Hill working as farm liaison, Rossi estimates this will be about a 25 percent increase over last year.

Hill this month garnered another $40,000 grant from The Rhode Island Foundation to export the Community Harvest program to other places, such as universities, hospitals, restaurants and school districts, and to continue work on the Web site. Hill is also working with a local group called Urban Greens to bring a local food co-op to Providence.

Her ultimate goal, she wrote in a recent e-mail, is this:

"My dream is that 1) not one more farm in the region gets planted with houses and 2) that not a single tomato climbs on an airplane, destined for a Rhode Island dinner plate." She signed it "Peas, as always, Louella."

For more information about the Community Harvest program or the local farm tours and picking excursions, write Louella Hill at localbeets@brown.edu.