Gainesville eateries move towards being more sustainable By: Daniel Ennis Gainesville may be known by most for being the home of a National Championship winning football team, but there is another side of Gainesville that outsiders may not see right away. If you spend a long enough time at the University of Florida, you begin to notice that the buzzword to fit nearly every purpose and situation on campus is “sustainability.” Classes have names like Cities of the World and Sustainability, there is an Office of Sustainability and in classes like Oral Performance of Literature, students are even taught about sustainable vowels when speaking for emphasis. The last example may not have as much to do with promoting a sustainable environment, but the UF campus in general does. In dining areas across campus especially, having sustainable eating options is an important issue because when an effort is made, being environmentally conscious is a realistic goal, even for big universities like the University of Florida. According to the Gator Dining Services website, there are many ways that the campus dining areas are being sustainable. By working with local farmers as often as possible, and at least trying to stay within the southeast region, the dining halls support sustainability as well as fair trade. At the Gator Corner Dining Center and the Fresh Food Company, a reusable to-go container program is setup in which students can take meals to-go in reusable containers and then bring them back to one of the two dining halls where the containers are rewashed so that they can be reused. “The waste in the long-run is less, so it’s probably better off,” said Kanoko Maeda, a sophomore student at UF. Maeda said that she visits the dining hall up to five times per day on her meal plan. However, UF dining halls are also being sustainable by offering meatless meals in each of the dining halls for vegetarian and vegan students and patrons. These vegan entrees vary from Portobello burgers to Cantonese stir-fry, and there is at least one option offered at every meal in each of the dining halls. In part because of these meatless options for the dining halls, UF has been nominated one of the most vegan friendly colleges by PETA2. Still, vegan options and fair trade meals aren’t limited by the University of Florida campus boundaries. “What’s nice about Gainesville is that there’s certainly a number of options to accommodate vegetarians and vegans alike,” said Luan Chang, a sophomore architecture student at the University of Florida. Chang said that he was on the meal plan last year and finds that this year there are many other places to get vegan or vegetarian options that are from ethically sourced locations. Locally owned and operated restaurants like the Book Lover’s Café support fair trade and help the community be sustainable. The cuisine of the café is vegetarian and vegan based, so it is an outlet for vegetarians or vegans to eat healthy and sustainably while maintaining a meatless diet. But according to co-owner Anne Haisley, vegetarians and vegans aren’t the only ones that come to the Booklover’s Café to eat food that they know is based in fair trade. “We did a survey of our customers and said, ‘are you a vegetarian?’ and 83% of the people were not vegetarians,” she said. Patrons of the café ate in the restaurant because they knew that the owners were making an effort to be sustainable and because they enjoyed the food. Haisley and her husband first opened a bookstore in Indiana giving away coffee that was locally grown, organic and based on fair trade practices, and when they moved to Florida to start the Book Lover’s Café, they continued to ship the coffee from Indiana because they knew that the farmers would get fair prices for their crops. According to Haisley, ever since the transition to Gainesville when the café was opened, local farmers have been the source the vegetables and food in soups, salads, and dishes. “We buy locally and organic, and many times over the years we’ve had farmers come to the back door and say, ‘I have such and such this week,’ and we’ll just buy it. After we see what they bring us, then we decide what we’re going to cook,” Haisley said. In addition to sustaining the environment, locally grown food is also economically sustainable because it keeps the money in the community. Haisley said that when food is purchased from a chain store, only about $0.13 of each dollar spent stays in town, compared to $0.70 or more of each dollar spent that stays in town when people shop locally. If it hasn’t set in enough that Gainesville is being a sustainable city, at least it is becoming known that UF and restaurants in the area are moving in the right direction. “[Compared to now] there was no place at all in Gainesville where you could get vegetarian food when we opened up. No place,” said Haisley.