Student Living

Berkeley Residence Halls Go for the Green

UC Berkeley, long noted for its innovative approaches to social issues, has introduced a new first in residence hall dining: certified organic salad bars. And students are “greening” another hall to conserve energy.

By Liese Greensfelder and Wendy Edelstein

Berkeley students and staff fill their bowls with organic fixings from the new all-organic salad bar at the Crossroads dining complex. (Steve McConnell photo)

Summer 2006 | Last spring, Berkeley students munched their way into history after loading up their plates with veggies, sunflower seeds, croutons, and vinaigrette dressing at the campus’s Crossroads dining commons. While salad bars have long been commonplace, the leafy greens and vegetables the students sat down to eat were the first ever to be prepared in a certified organic kitchen on an American college campus, according to the country’s leading organic certifying organization.

By spring 2007, all four of the dining halls managed by Cal Dining, one of the campus food services, will offer certified organic salad bars.

Each of the stainless steel pans cradled in ice along both arms of Crossroads’ lazy-V salad bar are laden with organic goodies: fresh spinach, carrot and cucumber slices, pasta salads, kidney and garbanzo beans, bacon bits (okay, they’re actually soy), sunflower seeds, salad dressings, and all the other fixings a great salad requires. Items that don’t meet the organic standards — breads, soups, olives — were banished to the end of the counter, beyond the banners heralding certification.

“This is huge, and it’s certainly the mark of the beginning of a trend in food service toward organic,” said Jake Lewin, director of marketing and international programs at California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF), the Santa Cruz-based organization that issued the landmark organic certification.

“While there are numerous colleges and other institutions that serve some organic food, until now, none has made the leap to being certified,” he said. “What Cal Dining is doing points the way for other colleges and institutions.”

Shawn LaPean, director of Cal Dining, said that going organic was a challenge. “We wanted to incorporate organic products into our program because it’s the right thing to do for our community, and our customers were asking for it,” he said. “But the student dining committee wouldn’t support an action that might increase room-and-board fees.” To hold down the higher costs that many organic items command, Cal Dining negotiated with its vendors and struck a deal with a local salad dressing company owned by a UC Berkeley alumna.

Chuck Davies, Cal Dining’s assistant director and executive chef, spearheaded the drive toward organic.

“At first we thought, ‘Okay, we can buy some organic things,’” Davies said. “But that just didn’t feel like it had enough integrity. There are standards that hold manufacturers and producers to a different level. My feeling was that people who serve the products should be held to standards as well.”

Davies is referring to the standards set forth in the National Organic Program, issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2002. Under the program, any food labeled organic must meet strict requirements. Regulations also apply to retail food establishments that serve organic food.

Most of the federal regulations are designed to maintain “organic integrity” of products from the time they arrive on the loading dock to the moment they are offered for consumption. The rules are so exacting that Davies quickly concluded that if Cal Dining was going to offer a line of organic food, he’d need a separate kitchen. Fortunately, a small stand-alone kitchen already existed in one corner of Crossroads’ food preparation area.

In September 2005, Davies hired Lorraine Aguilar, a senior in Berkeley’s Nutritional Sciences and Toxicology department, to help complete CCOF’s extensive application. The two created product flow charts and an audit trail showing from start to finish how organic products would be handled. They made maps of the kitchen and dining areas and outlined how staff would deal with dishwashing and pest control using only approved products. They wrote a manual for staff that includes instructions on how to clean equipment, food prep stations, and storage areas and how to keep organic products away from countertops, dishes, knives, or utensils that have come into contact with non-organic products. They devised color-coded labels to identify organic cutting boards and ordered green stickers printed with the word “organic” to be slapped onto every box of organic goods that arrives on the loading dock.

Davies submitted the application in December. After a review, an inspection, and requests for a few revisions, CCOF awarded the official stamp of organic certification to the salad bar kitchen last March.

“Between the training and the paperwork, the fact of the matter is that organic certification for a restaurant or food facility isn’t easy,” Lewin says. “The bottom line is that Crossroads now has a stringent system for ensuring that there is no commingling of organic products with non-organic products. It’s all about making sure the end product really is organic.”

In Crossroads’ special organic kitchen, Cal Dining staffer Maria Ventura pitches carrot peels into a bin destined for the compost pile rather than the trash. (Steve McConnell photo)

Organic certification is just one of Cal Dining’s many green business practices. Since it opened in January 2003, Crossroads has been a showcase of green design and management. In 2004, it became the first campus facility certified as a Bay Area Green business by Alameda County officials. Natural lighting and energy-efficient fixtures cut electricity consumption. Low-flow water faucets conserve water. Tables are cleaned with cloth instead of paper. Excess food is donated to a local homeless shelter, and food scraps are picked up by a local company to be turned into garden compost.

The Green Room
Students have taken it upon themselves to spread the greening of the residence halls from the dining commons to the living quarters.

This past year, a group of students opened the Green Room in Putnam Hall near College and Durant Avenues to prove that saving energy and resources doesn’t require making radical lifestyle choices. Local merchants donated Energy Star appliances and lighting rated for low-electricity usage as well as personal care products such as Tom’s of Maine toothpaste and mouthwash, Avalon Organics shampoo and conditioner, and Seventh Generation facial tissues.

Explanatory signs attached to each energy-saving, conservation-related item — from the Whirlpool refrigerator to the aluminum-free deodorant spray — distinguish the Green Room from neighboring residence hall accommodations. Sophomore Rachael Robertson, who lived in the Green Room this past year, provided tours of her small space to students and other members of the campus and talked about the LEED green building rating system and sustainability. She pointed out bike racks, recycling chutes, and low-flow toilets and faucets to visitors on the way to her room.

Unveiled last October, the Green Room began as a one-year experiment that will be expanded next year to include three rooms, thanks to a Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on Sustainability Green Fund Award the room won this spring. The Green Room recently received national recognition — it was honored at the Environmental Protection Agency’s eighth annual Environmental Awards Ceremony in San Francisco in April as one of 36 organizations and individuals in the Pacific Southwest that made an effort in 2005 to protect and preserve the environment.

Other sustainability efforts include Green Campus, a student-led campaign to educate and encourage students, faculty, and staff to be more energy-efficient. Green Campus has teamed up with two campus units — Campus Recycling and Refuse Services and Residential & Student Service Programs (RSSP) — on a number of projects. The compact-fluorescent-lightbulb (CFL) exchange program swaps students’ incandescent bulbs for 15-watt CFLs. Last fall, 1,500 CFLs were distributed. RSSP footed the bill for the new bulbs and for recycling the incandescent bulbs, and the Green Campus and Residential Sustainability Education Coordinators distributed the CFLs at a table in the Dining Commons once a week. A conservative estimate of the savings netted by this program: $2,000.           

Green Campus also coordinates Blackout Battles, an energy-saving competition designed to persuade students in campus residence halls to reduce their energy use and help raise awareness of the effects of electricity consumption. The students who won the competition in 2005 were rewarded with an ice cream party and a choice of a ping-pong table or pool table for their residence hall. The competition resulted in a 7.23-percent decrease in energy usage compared to 2004 rates and a cost reduction of $5,000 for the month of February. Blackout Battles were reprised last fall.