The Yale Sustainable Food Project began as an after-class conjecture in 2000, when a group of undergraduates taking an Environmental Science class started to wonder why they learned about the dangers of pesticides in lecture and yet ate meals covered with the stuff in Yale’s Dining Halls. They drew up a proposal: what if Yale had an on-campus farm, a place where students could learn first-hand about food and how it was grown, exploring the theory and practice of small-scale sustainable agriculture as part and parcel of their education? They submitted the plan for this space as their final project for the class, and then to the administration as an actual proposal: what might have been a solely academic exercise had become, for them, a personal project.

What these students were just realizing was something that Berkeley chef Alice Waters had known for years: food is more than simple sustenance. It is personal and cultural, affecting the globe’s resources both natural and economic. Alice’s daughter started as a Yale freshman right around when those students were drawing up their proposal and forming a group called Food From the Earth; it was a conversation between Alice and Yale President Richard Levin that helped expand the students’ idea for an on-campus farm into a full-blown revolution in the school’s food culture.

The Yale Sustainable Food Project was formed in order to address food in every aspect of campus life, working to change the way Yale bought produce and prepared dining hall meals as well as helping students understand why food’s provenance and preparation mattered to them. A full-time staff was hired on to ensure that the Project functioned as part of Yale as an institution; we are currently a crew of four, including an executive director, farm manager, special projects and outreach coordinator and program coordinator. One of our first projects was to take over one of Yale’s twelve residential college dining halls, coincidentally named Berkeley, and change its sourcing, re-write its menus and re-train its chefs; we also broke ground on the farm the students had envisioned in 2003, with educational programming around food and farming following soon after.

The Berkeley Test Kitchen was such a hit that Yale immediately went to work expanding on its successes. In 2007, Yale chose not to renew its contract with Aramark, a massive institutional provider, instead hiring an in-house Director of Dining with a background in sustainability. When Rafi Taherian was hired, the YSFP ended our formal relationship with Yale Dining in order to focus more fully on educational programming; we now work on teaching students why food matters so that they can be informed consumers and vocal advocates after they leave the university.

The Farm is the centerpiece of much of that programming: it is a productive one-acre market garden located about a fifteen minute walk from the center of campus where we grow everything from tomatoes and peppers to artichokes and figs, with chickens and bees living on-site as well. Produce from the Farm is sold at a weekly farmers’ market or to restaurants in New Haven; some of it is donated to hunger relief partners in the community, and of course we cook some and share it with our volunteers each week.

The Farm is run almost entirely on volunteer labor; paid student interns learn from our full-time Farm Manager, Daniel Macphee, and run open work hours three days a week from September through May, during which anyone and everyone are welcome to stop by and help out. For the summers we hire six full-time Farm interns, who get an in-depth look at small scale sustainable farming practices on our farm and other around Connecticut.

The Farm is also a vibrant community space that can serve as a meeting place for Yale affiliates and New Haven residents. We run a Seed to Salad program that brings students from local elementary schools to the site regularly over the course of six weeks in the spring, where they grown their own salad greens and learn about plants’ life cycles. The space is open to the public from dawn until dusk, and we encourage visitors to walk around and see what we’ve got growing—as they as they don’t step on or pick from any of our plants!

We aren’t all about work, however; a crucial piece of our mission is to engage participants through pleasure, so they see sustainable living as a matter of passionate engagement rather than drudgery or deprivation. We thank volunteers at the end of every Friday workday with pizza cooked in our wood-fired oven; we make the dough ourselves and top it with Farm-fresh ingredients, so that volunteers can make a visceral connection between plants in the field and food on the table, tasting the literal fruits of their labors. We try to have some good food at every event we run; it draws people in and starts conversation.

The last major piece of programming we run is the most explicitly educational: our Chewing the Fat speaker series brings authors, activists, farmers, and filmmakers to campus to talk about their work in sustainable food and agriculture. Past events have ranged from workshops on canning and preserving to lectures on ethical entrepreneurship or sustainable seafood to visits from luminaries like Michael Pollan, Carlo Petrini, Eliot Coleman and yes, our old friend Alice Waters. We try to highlight the diversity of work going on around sustainable agriculture, inspiring students to consider creative careers in the food world—or at least to understand the wealth of issues in the modern food system, so that they can think critically about what they consume after graduation.

Our next step is to move back into the classroom, bringing the YSFP’s story full circle. In the next several years we hope to see food, how it is grown, marketed, bought, prepared and eaten, taken seriously as a source of academic inquiry, cementing the notion that agriculture is just as worthy of study as great books and big questions, and that farming requires as much knowledge and forethought as banking or consulting. We believe that the world’s most pressing questions regarding health, culture, the environment, education, and the global economy cannot be adequately addressed without considering the food we eat and the way we produce it; our mission is to make sure that every Yale College student graduates prepared to address those issues, and become leaders in the effort to reform our food system.