Princeton University serves around ten thousand meals every day between its five dining halls and numerous cafes. In making choices about what food to buy and where to buy it from, the University has the potential to transform the food landscape of this part of the world, by putting pressure on growers to maintain certain standards and by charting a path for other large institutions to follow when thinking about the ethics of food.
Sourcing Wisely
In the past couple of decades, Princeton Campus Dining Services has emphasized a commitment to environmental sustainability and has attempted to go out into the food landscape and explicitly choose to buy food that supports small local farmers. But the path to ethical food goes deeper than this—it begins far down the chain with the farmworkers who pick the food. In the fall of 2023, a small group of students who were interested in farmworker justice began meeting to discuss ways that we could harness our position as Princeton students to support food justice movements. Out of these conversations, the Campus Food Ethics and Values Think Tank emerged.
Work-Driven Social Responsibility
Through meetings with Campus Dining Services leadership staff and guidance from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a leading farm worker rights organization, the Think Tank is building a research project rooted in the worker-driven social responsibility approach. Our current goals are
- Investigating tomatoes and dairy vendors as case studies for how we will approach the implementation of the WSR model within Princeton’s Campus Dining Services.
- Sending out letters to these vendors asking them questions, guided by WSR principles, regarding their commitment to and enforcement of safe and fair labor practices. As opposed to developing a new workers’ rights metric, we will be guided by metrics already developed by WSR organizations, while tailoring the standards to fit our university setting and build on existing relationships with local vendors.
- Documenting our tomato and dairy vendor case studies as part of an ongoing research paper highlighting our student-driven model and methodologies.
- Launching an educational initiative to build student buy-in and awareness about food ethics on campus.