Campus collaboration yields fresh, flavorful dining hall favorites
From farm-to-table, and from one end of campus to another, University Housing dining halls often feature fresh produce grown by students for students.
Housing chefs can source ingredients grown within a 4-mile radius of all dining halls thanks to a longtime, innovative partnership with the Sustainable Student Farm, located on the south end of campus, just off Lincoln Avenue in Urbana.
This fresh produce makes its way into pizza sauce, soups, composed salads and salad bars, juices and a variety of seasonal chef's choice menu items.
The Sustainable Student Farm was founded in 2009 as part of the Crop Sciences Department in the College of ACES, partially through a grant from the Student Sustainability Committee.
University Housing began investing in and working with the student farm right away, according to farm manager Matt Turino.
“From the very beginning, we've had a relationship with [University Housing’s] Dining Services,” Turino said. He said there were “foodies” among Housing’s administration and dining team who were “very excited to have produce grown here on campus” and said they’d “love to have local food coming into our dining halls.”
Farm manager Matt Turino addresses a group of students and community members at the Sustainable Student Farm.
Although food grown on the student farm represents just a fraction of the produce and ingredients used by Dining Services – which served more than 2.8 million meals to residents and guests last year, including conferences and catering, Housing remains the student farm’s top customer, utilizing about half of the produce grown on the farm, ranging as high as 55,000 pounds of produce in single year.
At one point, as many as 30,000 pounds of tomatoes grown on the student farm and harvested by hand were used in pizza sauce served in dining halls over the course of a year.
A team of Housing chefs plus students and faculty from the Food Science Department developed a recipe for the pizza sauce, which features Roma tomatoes from the student farm and is produced in Food Science & Human Nutrition’s Pilot Processing Plant, also funded in part by the Student Sustainability Committee.
The Pilot Processing Plant produces 2,000 – 5,000-pound batches of pizza sauce packaged in half-gallon pouches in each processing run.
A collaboration between University Housing and the Pilot Processing Plant has also produced vegan, pumpkin-based “Block I” cookies.
University Housing chefs use produce grown on the Sustainable Student Farm in a variety of dishes, including pizza sauce produced on campus.
The partnership between Housing and the student farm enhances the learning opportunities Illinois students have while working on the farm, and it also provides an opportunity for Housing chefs to get creative.
Turino said the student farm currently grows around 40 different crops, although that number is “a little tricky,” as some of the plant varieties are very similar. In any given year, Housing chefs may express an interest in 20 to 25 different vegetables, herbs and fruits.
“It's been fun to figure out how to grow things that work well for the chefs and figure out that relationship,” Turino said, specifically referencing large-sized peppers and beets. “And that's really useful for our students to learn as well – different markets have different needs.”
Dale Bargon, unit manager for LAR Dining Hall, said when chefs are alerted that different produce from the farm is ready and available, they “jump on it quick, like, ‘Oh, we want this. This would be a great chef's vegetable. We have this coming up on the menu.’ So, we jump on it and try to get as much of it as we can.”
He said the chefs’ enthusiasm for the local produce is obvious.
“I've never seen staff more excited to use up beets than when we can actually process in here and then incorporate them into our recipes, or even just onto our salad bars,” he said.
Bargon said summer is an exciting time for Housing chefs, as they host numerous recipe-testing events, trying out potential menu items, including some using produce from the student farm.
He said chefs challenged themselves last summer, asking, “What can we do special [with what] we're getting from the farm?”
This included creative uses of squash, experimenting with a pasta sauce and incorporating root vegetables in a lasagna.
“We're just excited to serve whatever fresh we can get from the farm,” Bargon said. “Our staff's excited to serve it. Our students are excited to eat it. It's cool to know that it just comes from right down the road.”
Turino said students from a variety of classes and programs work on the 5-acre farm, including students doing research, summer internships or working part-time jobs there; students enrolled in a couple classes, which use the farm as a lab; and non-degree seeking students in a small farm-certificate program learning about vegetable production and agriculture.
“We are a space for students to get their feet wet,” Turino said. “Everything we do here is hand scale, so it's a nice scale to get started in agriculture. Education is our main goal.”
Each September, University Housing residents and the community at large are invited to tour the farm during an open house, with Housing chefs and dining staff on site, preparing and serving food and beverages that incorporate produce grown there.
Students enjoy food and beverages prepared by University Housing chefs using produce grown on campus during the Sustainable Student Farm open house, which is held each September.
“I think the best thing that a student or parent could take away from the partnership that we have with our Sustainable Student Farm is just how much we're trying to show our students, educate our students, and then just provide for our students the same way we would with our own families,” Bargon said.
When it comes to freshness and food quality, he said there are “certain things that we just don't compromise on,” noting that students within University Housing are “being well taken care of."
Turino said the farm uses low input, low impact, organic agricultural practices.
“We are using cover crops, utilizing the magic of photosynthesis to grow these plants that pull carbon and nitrogen from the air to build the soils and grow better vegetables with lower inputs,” he said. “We try to use as few fertilizers as we possibly can. We're using crop rotations and cover crops to avoid past diseases and too much extraction of one nutrient. We also use no herbicides or fungicides and try to use integrated pest management practices to reduce our use of organic insecticides.”
This sustainable approach to agriculture, paired with the very short distance from the farm to dining halls, which reduces greenhouse emissions and the carbon footprint often associated with transporting food, benefits the environment and the people consuming the fresh produce.
In addition to University Housing dining halls, there are several ways students and community members can enjoy produce from the student farm, including participation in the Get Fresh! program, membership in its CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) and stopping by its farm stands on the Quad on Thursdays, from late May through late November.
Moving forward, Turino hopes to see the Sustainable Student Farm’s partnership with University Housing continue to flourish.
“We're really excited to have the food that we grow being eaten by the students here on campus,” he said. “It's just a great relationship as far as just getting our food into the campus community – it's grown by campus for campus.”