Defending Sustainable Eats

A panel including celebrity chef Alice Waters and the co-founder of Yale’s Sustainable Food Project encouraged audience members last night to participate in “A Delicious Revolution” in anticipation of Harvard’s upcoming “Sustainability Week.”

The Humanities Center at Harvard hosted the discussion, which humanities professor and director of the Center Homi K. Bhabha moderated. The panel explored the role food plays in people’s lives as nourishment, as an expression of care, and as social and economic therapy.

Before the dialogue began, guests were invited to eat from a smorgasbord of sustainable produce piled high on tables extending around the perimeter of the room.

Bhabha opened the discussion by stressing the importance of sustainability as not only a social option but also an obligation.

“Sustainability obliges us in material and metaphorical ways to nurture our resources and live within our means,” he said. “But a commitment to sustainability goes beyond that obligation and encourages us to make ethical commitments as citizens that align our material needs to our moral ends.”

Waters, who founded the renowned restaurant Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., as well as a non-profit cooking and gardening program for middle school students in the Berkeley area, spoke of her belief that “food is woven into the fabric of life.”

Stressing the importance of engaging youth in the process of growing, cultivating, and cooking food, Waters said, “I’m just hoping that this can happen in every institution in this country—and you can begin here.”

The discussion also addressed Yale’s Sustainable Food Project and the steps Harvard is taking in a similar direction.

Joshua L. Viertel ’01 was instrumental in creating the pilot program in one of Yale’s dining halls in 2003, and it has grown into a campus-wide initiative in which 40 percent of food options in each dining hall at Yale are sustainable.

Martin Breslin, the director for culinary operations at Harvard University Dining Services, wrapped up the discussion with the 2008 HUDS Sustainability Report, documenting Harvard’s progress to advance sustainability and offer fresh, local produce in dining halls.

Harvard’s Sustainability Week, which takes place from Oct. 19 to Oct. 24, will feature a variety of activities organized by the University as well as by the Phillips Brooks House Association and student organizations such as the Environmental Action Committee.

The week will culminate in the Sustainability Celebration, which features as its keynote speaker former Vice President Al Gore ’69.