What You Should Know

Columbia University's Dining Services have taken great strides towards becoming more environmentally friendly, including recycling in dining halls and retail units, creating campaigns to prevent excess food waste, and developing a composting initiative in John Jay.  You can keep yourself up-to-date on Dining Service's sustainability projects at Our Green Initiatives.  

However, truly sustainable dining involves effort on the part of individual students, faculty and staff as well as dining services.  Buying Fair Trade coffee, for example, can help to maintain biodiversity and sustainable living in developing countries by providing local people with the ability to compete in a global marketplace.  Eating locally grown foods can help to reduce environmentally-related shipping costs such as carbon emissions from planes and trucks, and supporting sustainable agriculture can reduce the use of pesticides and minimize resource waste in farming.  These are just some of the various ways in which we can protect our environment by making smarter decisions about the foods we eat.

How You Can Help

• Avoid wasting food!  Take small first portions when you are eating at John Jay or elsewhere—you can always go back for seconds later.  Plan ahead and decide what you want to eat before you start filling your plate.  Finally, take note of how much you are throwing away after each meal.  You might be surprised by how much you are wasting and be able to adjust your eating habits accordingly.
• Avoid creating other kinds of waste when you eat.  Use reusable containers for water and other drinks instead of plastic bottles and paper cups.  When you go shopping for groceries, bring along your own reusable bags instead of accepting new paper or plastic bags every time, and avoid products that come with heavy packaging.  When you do have plastic or paper waste, make sure to recycle.
• Support local and sustainably grown agriculture.  Foods shipped over long distances by car, boat, or plane take incredible resources and lead to large carbon emissions while in transit.  They are also more likely to include chemicals intended to preserve them for the long-haul.  Locally grown food is more likely to be truly fresh and health, and will help to mitigate the environmental impact of your dining.  Meanwhile, farms that focus on sustainability will use less of valuable resources such as water and will not use pesticides that could be harmful both to you and to the environment.
• Buy fair trade products when possible.  Products with the fair trade label such as coffee, cocoa, or sugar ensure that producers in developing countries are paid a fair price for their goods.  These producers in turn are less likely to be forced to turn to more environmentally harmful practices such as hunting, logging, or charcoal burning to survive.  Most fair trade products are also certified organic and shade-grown.
• If you have a kitchen at home, consider home composting.  Read more at the New York City Compost Project.