Sustainability and the Harvard Food Desert

I am a passionately liberal-minded, environmentally-conscious person, and I can’t figure out anything to do about it.
I care about the environment. I care about workers’ rights, and ending sweatshop labor. I care about cultural relativism, food justice, and small farmers. I care about sustainability and ending global poverty.
But most of the time, in my day-to-day life, I find it very hard to act on my principles. Sure, I can ride my bike to the supermarket instead of taking the car; I can go to farmers’ markets; I can attend a concert to “Save Darfur.” However, as hopefully everyone knows, hemp tote bags and organic produce don’t make for a robust environmental movement: “trendy” green is not actually green.
I’ve written before about the futility of these actions towards creating systematic change, but right now I’m not even talking about institutional investments or corporate responsibility. Instead, I’m concerned about my individual purchasing power. After all, when considered along with along with the purchasing power of every other young person with her environmentally conscious hands tied, it is not insignificant. But  when I try to spend my money in a socially just way, I barely know where to start.
For example, say I want to buy some new jeans. I was raised to spend frugally—but Target and Walmart are bad employers; I don’t want to support their anti-union business model. I could go higher-end and visit the Urban Outfitters in Harvard Square—but I recently learned that Urban Outfitters President Richard Hayne has donated $13,150 to Republican Sen. Rick Santorum over the years. And undoubtedly, countless more clothing brands also profit from sweatshop labor or donate to unsavory candidates, unbeknownst to me.
I, like other socially conscious people, have no easy way to know where exactly my money goes after I take home my new pair of jeans. Short of extensive research, I can’t know whether corporations have environmentally-friendly or labor-friendly policies. This makes it extremely hard for me to put my money where my mouth is and support just companies.
With clothing, the solution isn’t hard. I simply choose not to participate in the system of capitalist clothes-purchasing. Instead, I obtain my clothing second-hand, buying it from thrift stores or borrowing it from friends. (Or theoretically, I would, if I weren’t so tempted by TJ Maxx.) This ensures that my money won’t end up as profit for a large corporation whose principles I disagree with.
I can easily buy office supplies, technology, and furniture second-hand. However, I spend the majority of my money on food… and short of dumpster-diving, there’s no easy way to obtain food second-hand. Instead, I must rely on incomplete information about whether my food is local, organic, pesticide-free, or even packaged efficiently. To make matters worse, the apparent benefit in sustainability of vegan, local, and organic food may be completely offset by the less-efficient farming and packaging practices of smaller farms.
And college dining halls are one of the most frustrating examples of lack of information about sources. Not only do I have limited choices about the food I can eat—tofu but not tempeh, apples but not peaches—I also have no information about the source of my food. Beyond vague labels that intimate that “35-70 percent of produce is locally sourced” and that almost 20% of the university’s eggs are “cage-free,” I know nothing about the sustainability or source of my food choices.

At college, I live in a food desert and also in an information desert. I want to do the right thing, to buy the right products, to eat the right food—but HUHDS makes that nearly impossible.
So what can be done? Clearly, food sustainability is yet another instance where transparency on the part of the University and corporations would allow more informed consumption. HUHDS should release and publicize more information about its food sources, and environmentally conscious students should be involved in food purchasing decisions.
I may never know the true source of my food until American food producers and distributers commit to placing sustainability over profit and release information about the true environmental cost of their products. In the meantime, I’ll continue trusting labels, handing over my money, and hoping that I’ve done the right thing.
Photo credit thecrimson.com