Document Type

Policy Brief

Publication Date

3-2024

Abstract

Two undergraduate students at Santa Clara University were hired to work as Food Systems Fellows from July 2023 to January, 2024. This position was co-sponsored by the Center for Sustainability and the Auxiliary Services division. The goal of this work was to explore the Santa Clara University food system’s impact on the environment from both an ecological and a social perspective and identify opportunities for improvement.

The Fellows utilized standards and core values from The Real Food Challenge, a national non-profit dedicated to leveraging the power of colleges and universities to increase equity and sustainability in food systems. The Real Food Challenge provides student researchers with rigorous standards and procedures for identifying products that qualify as ‘Real’ (see page 7). The student research teams work with university dining service providers to analyze all or a representative portion of purchases from the year of interest. Real Food Challenge connects researchers with full-time staff members who can support them throughout their analysis. This report contains the results of the Real Food Challenge analysis at Santa Clara University for the 2022-23 academic year.

The Center for Sustainability, the Food System Fellows, and the faculty mentors at Santa Clara University have additionally added the Sustainability Indicator Management & Analysis Platform (SIMAP) climate emissions analysis for university food systems to investigate the carbon and nitrogen footprint of SCU’s food system for the first time. The combination of year-to-year trends in the Real Food data and this new climate emissions data provides the finest resolution to date of the ecological impacts of the University’s food system.

We found that 20.67% of food purchased on campus met Real Food Criteria, exactly .01% lower than the analysis for the 2018-2019 academic year This slight decrease can be attributed to the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. The University goal set in 2019 was to reach 25% by 2020. We have set a new goal for the University to reach 25% by 2024 and are confident this can be accomplished using our recommendations. In the poultry and snack categories we saw the highest percentages for Real Food as well as the highest increases since 2019(school year). However, we saw even higher decreases in Real Food percentages in the produce and seafood categories. Many changes made during the pandemic can account for the decrease in Real Food, and we hope that the University can continue to improve procurement practices as well as shift towards more plant-based and local foods in efforts to reduce our emissions and lessen our burden on the environment.

Using SIMAP allowed us to view and analyze the carbon and nitrogen emissions from food purchased during the two representative months. While only 40.65% of food weight came from animal-based products, 89.35% of nitrogen emissions and 84.04% of carbon emissions from Santa Clara University’s food system are due to consumption of animal-based products. 

One of our primary recommendations to increase our Real Food percentage and reduce our negative impact on the planet is to transition more of our meat and poultry purchases to ‘Real’ options while simultaneously cutting back on these purchases. To aid efforts in transitioning to a more plant-based campus we recommend University dining services implement Default-Veg. Additionally, we recommend more of the produce be purchased from local and organic farmers.

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