News- Chow Locally
This article was originally published in the Missoulian (December 15, 2003)
Chow Locally By ROB CHANEY of the Missoulian
Deciding whether you are what you eat can be a sensitive question, but there's no disputing that you are where you eat.
Unfortunately, most of us don't know where our food has been. To improve that situation, a group of University of Montana students has teamed with the UM Dining Services staff to increase the number of ingredients coming directly from Montana farmers and ranchers. As the campus community trudged through the last weekend before finals, Saturday visitors to the University Center Food Court found a brunch spotlighting Montana-raised steak sandwiches, locally grown french fried potatoes, eggs Benedict complete with eggs, ham and muffins all made in Big Sky Country.
"That steak sandwich has a dramatic difference in taste," Dining Service Chef Brian Crego said. "The meat's not packaged to travel 1,000 miles. That's part of the goal, why we're doing this: less packaging and treatments."
The trade-off is more work and expense for the Dining Services staff, but Crego said it evens out. For example, locally grown tomatoes must be sliced by hand, because they're not firm enough to go through a slicing machine. But the reason those commercial tomatoes can be machine sliced, Crego said, is because they arrive unripe, with little juice or flavor.
Friday night, much of the dining staff was up peeling and slicing Montana potatoes for Saturday's french fries and hash browns. While it would have been easier to rip open a bag of processed fries, creating a market for those local goods is the best way for local producers to invest in their own processing equipment.
"UM really likes value-added products," said Shelly Connor, a graduate student in environmental studies and one of the Farm-to-College interns who helped develop the local-purchase program. It would rather pay more, and the farmer would earn more, for carrots that come peeled and sliced than straight from the ground.
While Saturday's brunch was one of five special meals served since May, Montana-grown products have become a regular part of the Food Service's annual $2.5 million budget.
The students forged links with the Western Montana Growers Cooperative, which represents a handful of commercial farmers, ranchers, dairies and wheat millers. A big challenge was helping those growers learn the production standards for purity, sanitation and volume UM must follow in its food purchases.
In addition to the fresh-cooked food, the Farm-to-College program also found shelf space in the UM Cascade Country Store for locally produced beef jerky, pasta and granola. The store also moves enough quesadillas that supplier Mexitana Tortilla has had to expand its production capacity, Connor said.
In another direction, the Food Service kitchens are using all the Montana-grown safflower oil they can buy. After cooking, the old oil is sent to the university's biodiesel program to fuel campus shuttle buses.
"It helps the university and it helps the grower," said UM Food Court supervisor Nina Murch. Since the university started targeting locally grown products, the price of safflower oil has gone down slightly because of the volume buying, she said.
"Some vendors are giving us wholesale breaks," Crego added. "It's still a touch more expensive, but it's not killing the budget. The only thing we really have trouble getting is Montana frozen vegetables. Or if you can, we'd like to know who has them."
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