If one goes by appearances and marketing, the University of Minnesota might as well change its colors to gold, maroon, and green. The university certainly seems to be a veritable bastion of environmentally progressive thought: according to public relations releases, the Twin Cities campus is one of the greenest in the nation, with subsidized public transit, 75 E85-powered and 53 hybrid vehicles in its fleet, on-campus farmer’s markets, and even a minor in Sustainability Studies. The University Dining Service purchases 18 percentof its food locally. There’s even a student-run organic farm. At first blush, our august institution certainly looks to be leading the way into a bright, green-tinted future, with CFL light bulbs illuminating kitchen tables everywhere and solar panels on every roof.

So why is U of M Biology, Science, and Environment major and local/organic food activist David Rittenhouse dissatisfied?

The answer is that it’s all PR spin. Rittenhouse says the university supports a few sustainability programs, and then “cleverly words” PR copy to make it appear far more representative of the school as a whole. “If we want to see change, we’ll first have to expose all the lies, and then offer solutions for how to change that. You have to offer solutions and show examples.”

Rittenhouse has been working hard to offer those solutions. He said that he and several friends realized that there weren’t any sustainable or local food options on campus for the average student, and decided to try to solve the problem.

They knew that students at other colleges had been successful in organizing small organic/local food operations. At Northland College in Ashland, Wisconsin, students had managed to open a local/organic mobile cart outside their student union, selling soup at reasonable and competitive prices. Rittenhouse and his fellow activists determined that it would be nearly impossible to open a stand in Coffman, and almost as challenging to have a cart outside. “There’s too much red tape to try to sell anything here,” Rittenhouse said.

The University has a contract with Aramark Food Services that stipulates that 90 percent of food distributed on campus must come from Aramark, with other major food corporations such as Starbucks and Panda Express occupying the other 10 percent. Rittenhouse and his friends realized that simply opening a small soup stand would require changing the entire process by which food is distributed on campus. They haven’t given up, and are hoping to lobby the right people to change the contract with Aramark when it comes up for renewal, or to switch to a more sustainable vendor altogether. Still, these institutional barriers to students who want alternatives to corporate food on campus call into question the University’s commitment to sustainable alternatives.

There is one place on campus that sells local, organic food: the Campus Club, located atop Coffman Union. While the Campus Club’s web site purports to offer a “common, informal gathering place for broad community interaction,” the $189 annual dues for student, faculty or staff membership that is required to eat there places is squarely in the realm of a rich, fancy boutique restaurant that “real folks” can’t afford to eat at. Ironically, some of the produce served here originates at the university’s student-run organic farm. In an almost perfect microcosm of the university’s underlying attitude toward sustainability, the product of the hard work and organizing of forward thinking students is ultimately appropriated to nourish the elite alumni and administrators that place so many barriers in the way of sustainable progress. The farm is locked into this relationship, because there simply are no other places to sell their product on campus.

Rittenhouse is involved with the student-run organic farm, called Cornercopia. Located on the St. Paul campus, it was started to provide students interested in sustainable agriculture with hands-on farming opportunities. There is even a semester-long course for students to learn about planning, financing, and operating an organic farm. UDS purchased 450 pounds of produce from Cornercopia in 2009. According to a Minnesota Daily article published April 22, Cornercopia coordinator Courtney Tchida is in open conversation with UDS executive chef Gil Junge and UDS director Karen DeVet about expanding sustainable options on campus.

Still, that 450 pounds is less then 1 percent of the local produce that UDS purchases, meaning there is the potential to increase production at the farm to meet existing demand. Rittenhouse believes there is enough interest among the student body to increase the scale of the farm, but there simply isn’t enough support from the University. “We’re struggling to stay afloat. Most of our funding comes from grants, comes from outside sources. Individuals are very supportive, but it seems like the institution as a whole makes it extremely difficult to get new environmental initiatives going.”

So if there is already demand for product and student interest, why hasn’t the organic farm been properly funded and scaled up to provide organic, local, healthy food for all students?

The answer, according to Rittenhouse, is all around him when he thrusts his shovel into the dirt at Cornercopia. The organic farm sits on a meager 1.25 acres, surrounded on all sides by soybeans genetically modified for the easy application of industrial pesticide Roundup, found in studies to cause genetic damage, increase crop susceptibility to disease, and to damage bacteria necessary for soil health. It is produced by Monsanto, an agribusiness giant also responsible for the development of Agent Orange, the poisonous defoliant used during the Vietnam war that has resulted in 400,000 deaths and 500,000 children born with birth defects, according to the Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “I even doubt the credibility of our organic farm, because of the drift from the fields all around us,” says Rittenhouse.

Still, this barely scratches the surface of the University’s close involvement with Big Agriculture. To really see what the University’s priorities are, we need look no further then its relationship with another major agricultural giant: Cargill. According to a U of M press release, in September 1999, Cargill donated $10 million to “expand the university’s work in the field of microbial and plant genomics.” The result was the creation of the Microbial and Plant Genomics institute, funded partially by public money, and the construction of the Cargill Building for Microbial and Plant Genomics. Located less then two blocks from the Cornercopia organic farm, it is the U.S.’s first university building exclusively dedicated to plant genomics, according to the web site of construction company Shaw Lundquist Inc.

Cargill is the largest privately held corporation in the United States, and ,as such, has much lower requirements for transparency in its operations then publicly traded corporations. A full analysis of Cargill’s shady dealings is beyond the scope of this article, but the company has had been implicated in scandals as varied as knowingly contaminating groundwater near its production plants, price fixing, Amazon Rainforest deforestation, selling mercury-tainted grains, and child labor in periphery nations.

Described in a Star Tribune article as a “looming, silent giant,” Cargill also controls a staggering portion of the food supply of the United States. As a mid-level supplier involved in processing and distributing agricultural supplies and commodities, Cargill has unparalleled power to influence agricultural markets, right down to the price consumers pay for a hot dog. Its $120 million in annual revenues makes it larger economically then two-thirds of the world’s countries. According to a Financial Times article, every egg used in a McDonald’s restaurant passes through a Cargill plant.

The University’s involvement with companies like Monsanto and Cargill exposes its important role in the industrial agricultural complex. These corporations’ mode of operation is to monopolize control of the food supply, choking out alternatives while making astronomical profits at the expense of the health of people and the environment. What better way to increase that profit margin then to offload in-house research to publicly funded universities? The sheer hypocrisy of the PR narrative that the University of Minnesota is an institution dedicated to a sustainable, green future is impossible to ignore.

Every day, individuals like David Rittenhouse, small groups, and even departments and institutes at the U of M are doing real research, taking real action, and making real strides toward the goal of a more sustainable future. In contrast, institutionally, as a whole, the University has yet to make any deep changes to the way it operates. It co-opts, for marketing purposes, the work of forward-thinking activists, researchers, and other community members, while still maintaining close involvement and ties with the companies that embody the very problems that these dedicated people are trying to overcome: the destruction of the environment, the centralization of power and control in our food supply, the production of potentially unhealthy and unsafe foods to bolster corporate profits, and the application and release of pesticides into our environment.

Ultimately, as long as the University continues to accept money from and name buildings after corporations like Cargill, the university’s sustainability PR line must be seen for what it actually is: window-dressing to obscure the university’s role in the destructive and soulless economic structure of Big Ag.

Tags: University of Minnesota