Feeding Hungry Hordes Sustainably a Priority for ‘Food Czar’

Published: October 16, 2009

Pictured in Yale Commons are (left to right) Rafi Teherian, executive director of Yale Dining Services; Sarah Moses ’10, a student worker at the market; and Regenia Phillips, director of residential college operations.

New Haven, Conn. — As executive director of Yale Dining Services, overseeing 27 campus food operations, Rafi Taherian is keenly aware of the truth of the saying that "the best is the enemy of the good" — that a demand by food purists for organic, local and fresh ingredients can be at odds with the job of putting 14,000 meals on the table daily, especially in New England where the growing season and the academic calendar barely intersect.

Nonetheless, Taherian is professionally and personally committed to keeping Yale's carbon food print small, and he has a messianic zeal to make Yale a model of sustainable dining for universities and large institutions everywhere.

"Yale Dining has a leadership role to play," says Taherian, who came to Yale from Stanford 18 months ago. He credits President C. Richard Levin as the visionary behind the mission. "President Levin's leadership in sustainability advocacy is the inspiration and driving force, and we are here to ‘operationalize' his vision for food at Yale," he says.

With a realm that includes the 12 residential college dining halls, as well as University Commons, the Graduate School dining hall, bake shops, cafés and a robust catering program, Yale's food czar oversees a wide range of operations. He directs the purchase of all the food served and all the non-food goods and services. He is also focused on reducing resources in dining operations and managing waste and recycling.

For each of these operations, Taherian and his team of professionals continue to develop innovative initiatives to save resources by cutting back on energy use and water consumption, reducing waste, and recycling more. It is the complicated and never-ending effort to meet the dictates of a sustainable diet, however, that is probably his biggest — and most rewarding — challenge, he says.

Taherian, who is fond of illustrating his points graphically, draws three intersecting circles on a white board, representing the trinity of concerns that govern any sustainable enterprise: "preservation of the environment," "social responsibility" and "economic viability" — or, as he describes the latter, "stewardship of funds."

With these three principles in mind, Taherian makes sure that no detail in the great chain of dining evades his scrutiny. Together with his team he carefully considers the life cycle of every commodity used and every ingredient consumed in his trade. "We must be aware of the bigger picture," he says, noting that every carrot that makes its way to the Yale dining halls has a story behind it.

He draws another chart of concentric circles to illustrate the priority levels that guide the purchase of ingredients. In the center of the circle are "organic" and "local." Purely in terms of its carbon footprint, the ideal carrot would hail from an organic farm within wheelbarrow distance of central campus, he notes. For practical purposes, however, the farthest the carrot can travel from its source to the table and remain in the "sustainable procurement area" is preferably within a 250-mile radius of New Haven, says Taherian. This area, he notes, extends north to Maine and south to northern Pennsylvania and to the west takes in a significant portion of New York state farmland.

Distance, though, is only one variable of the sustainability equation, says Taherian; other considerations are the soil in which the vegetable was grown and the wholesale price of the crop. If a farmer 50 miles away sells organically raised carrots for $2 per pound, while a farmer in Branford, who uses a minimum amount of pesticide, sells carrots for $1.50 per pound, Taherian says he would probably opt for the Branford carrots. In the imperfect world of food supply and demand where many options are weighed against each other, local usually trumps organic, he notes.

Since, as Taherian explains, it is very challenging to grow certain crops entirely without pesticides in our region (such as apples, cherries and peaches), he includes within the "almost ideal" circle of procurement produce that is grown using an Integrated Pest Management (IPM) system — that is, with the least amount of the least-toxic pesticide applied only after all other means of pest control have been exhausted.

The issue of "stewardship of funds," or staying within budget, is also a tricky matter to contend with while keeping Yale Dining operations sustainable, he says. "It is difficult for small, organic farms to produce sufficient quantities of produce in an economically viable way for Yale Dining," notes Taherian.

Each time the dining halls feature a specific produce item, they need 800 to 1,200 pounds. The numbers add up if this item is on the menu more than once. "Small farms generally do not have that kind of bandwidth," says Taherian.

Nonetheless, he is aware that Yale has a positive impact on the local economy by sourcing as much food as possible from the area. On the other hand, if Yale bought up all the produce local farmers could provide, he explains, it would devastate local retailers in the food trade who wouldn't be able to compete for the goods. Here, the balance to be struck is not between organic and local, but between getting the best price for the best goods and being a socially responsible neighbor, he says.

The most obvious hindrance to staying within the "sustainable procurement" circle is providing such staples as coffee, oranges and bananas, he notes, but there is also the reality that the volume of food required to feed more than 5,000 students three times a day makes strictly regional purchasing problematic and cost prohibitive.

Perhaps the biggest problem he faces, Taherian says, is not where to find sustainable sources of food, but how and where to store the food that he has to buy at a moment that is both financially and seasonally opportune.

"I just bought 30,000 pounds of wild salmon," he says with his arms outstretched and his shoulders raised in bewilderment at the predicament. "Where am I going to put all that salmon until I can use it?" His question is a rhetorical one, since he had already arranged for the fish to be stored in an off campus warehouse. Yale Dining Services is planning to locate other places to store the tons of tomatoes Yale buys from local farms during the late summer harvest or the peaches that are plucked from Connecticut orchards in August before students arrive on campus, to cite only two examples.

Taherian sees large-scale food processing as part of the long-term solution to maintaining a sustainable food system at Yale. He also envisions an entirely self-sustaining New Haven bottling or canning plant employing local workers at fair wages as a model for other institutions to follow.

Meanwhile, the goal for Yale Dining Services is to obtain 60% of all its supplies and services from sustainable sources by 2013, and to reduce energy, water and resource use by 20% below 2009 levels by 2013.

Taherian has made educating all members of the Yale community about where their food comes from an essential component of his sustainable mission. To that end, Yale Dining organizes bus tours for students to visit local farms and learn from the farmers themselves how cows are milked, soil is tilled and tomatoes grown. Students get to bring home free samples of the seasonal crops, which they pick themselves.

Yale Dining Services also brings the farm to Yale. Every Friday from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. a small farmers market offering only local produce and Yale-baked goods at wholesale prices is set up in a corner of Yale Commons. The market is open to the public at large, and it will continue until the last pumpkin is plucked from the Connecticut ground, probably just before Thanksgiving.

The newest addition to the Yale dining scene is a snack parlor/lunch boutique called "uncommon." Housed in a corner of Yale Commons that used to be an office, the store offers students on the run sustainable sandwiches and salads as part of their meal plan. For everyone else, notes Taherian, the prices are still not to be beat.

Related information: Yale Sustainable Food Project

— By Dorie Baker

PRESS CONTACT: Dorie Baker 203-432-8553