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Nathan Palmer said he cares where his food comes from and what happens to it before he eats it.
Palmer, a senior from Marion studying accounting, said his mother raised him on organic food because she believed it was safer than food tainted by steroids, antibiotics and chemicals.
"I don't like how farm animals, when they're used for food, are treated like crap," Palmer said. "I like the idea of the organic farmer."
Nationwide organic and local food movements have increased in popularity as writers such as author Barbara Kingsolver and Business Week reporter Pallavi Gogoi have addressed the benefits of knowing where food originates.
In 2005, chef Jessica Prentice gave a name to the national movement when she coined the term locavore - a combination of locus, which means place, and vorare, which means swallow or devour - and encouraged people to find their food within 100 miles of home, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
University staff and faculty joined the movement when they met to discuss dining hall fry oil as a possible biodiesel fuel for university farm equipment. Although the fuel idea has not made it past the drawing board, the meeting led to the birth of a program that brings food from the university's farms to its dinner tables.
Although the Farm to Fork program is only a few months old, staff and faculty have already incorporated university-grown tomatoes and hogs into the dining facilities at Lentz Hall, said Bill Connors, the university chef involved in the movement.
"We need to cut down on the carbon footprint that the university is leaving," Connors said. "We had been looking around a lot to try to improve our sustainability efforts in dining before this and really had gotten nowhere."
He said he works with U.S. Food Service, his primary vendor in St. Louis, to keep its purchasing for SIUC within 150 miles of the facility.
"I figured that would put us at about a 250-mile region for local purchases," he said.
He said he saw an opportunity to use university-raised food at the meeting and soon made use of a couple of whole hogs at a luau to welcome new Resident Assistants this fall, then again at the university's Homecoming tailgate tent.
"It's still very much in the infant stages," Connors said.
The Swine Center could not produce enough pork to fully supply the university, but university farms as a whole could provide a substantial amount of meat as the Farm to Fork program grows, said Tom Rosenthal, university swine manager.
The use of university-raised hogs on campus is limited by the availability of those facilities, so fewer than a dozen of the animals have been used in the program, he said.
Palmer said he is more comfortable with small-scale farming in which animals are more likely to be treated better.
"I think that's definitely better - no pigs lined up for a half a mile waiting to get their heads cut off," he said.
University dining purchases campus-raised hogs, then ships them to a meat processing facility in Anna or Du Quoin, the closest meat packing facilities since several small local ones closed, he said.
"(The university is) getting something that's homegrown," Rosenthal said. "I select the ones that they're getting, so we make sure that what they get is the top of the line. "
The costs and financial benefits are similar whether the meat goes to market or to the university, Rosenthal said.
The university pays to transport its hogs to slaughter, so the closer the facilities are, the lower the overall cost to the university would be, he said.
He said new facilities, including one in DeSoto, are in the works.
Nicole Lence, a junior from Carbondale studying animal science, said she is vegetarian and does not eat animals, but thinks local, small-scale facilities are better.
"I think it's better to do things locally," Lence said. "When you mass produce, you're less likely to find the little things that are wrong and when you home grow, you put a lot more care and effort into it."
For another portion of the program, Connors uses tomatoes grown on a research plot by students in the College of Agricultural Sciences, he said.
Connors said southern Illinois has roughly 150 farms, but only 10 percent to 20 percent of what they produce is used locally as human food.
"I think it's good for local economies, to try and spread the so-called university wealth a little bit," Connors said.
Part of that wealth would be hands-on experience for students participating in the agriculture programs, Lence said.
"When you do it yourself, you really get into it and you learn a whole lot more," she said.
Connors said national interest in locally grown, in-season products sparked his interest roughly five years ago.
"When I go to the Farmers' Market on Saturday and buy stuff that I know has been grown in our area, it just seems to be so much fresher and have so much flavor," he said. "As a chef, I feel like we definitely sacrifice freshness and flavors to buy out-of-season products."
Connors said the Farm to Fork program could serve as a recruitment tool for the College of Agricultural Sciences and any potential student interested in what he believes could be one of the few environmentally-friendly campuses.
"I think it would be a big boost for the university to be able to say we are truly working on a green, sustainable relationship here and trying to help the environment out," Connors said.
Brandy Oxford can be reached at 536-3311 ext. 255 or brandy.oxford@siude.com
