Farming and Eating Locally: An Interview with Garry Griffith about Augustana's Farm2Fork Program
Intersections No. 36 · Fall 2012
What was food service like when you first came to Augustana? How have things changed?
I was a little bit shocked, actually. Almost all the vegetables, soups, and even the meats were pre-cooked and pre-packaged. We weren’t making much of anything from scratch. In our kitchens at that time you could find dozens of pairing knives but no chef knives. Why? Because the knives were only used to open packages. It didn’t take us long to start getting all of our vegetables, potatoes, and even meats fresh from local farmers. I and others started working extensively with our staff in the summers, giving them a set of skills for choosing and preparing quality foods. We’ve really come a long way.
What we call our “Farm2Fork” program is a significant investment into the health of our community, helping to build regional and local food systems. Local farms and ranches provide our campus with a direct and reliable food source, thereby making us less dependent on food sources that are thousands of miles away. Jim Johansen of Wesley Acres in the neighboring town of Moline was our first partner, but there are now a number of others that we work with closely.
Is it hard to find farmers to work with?
It wasn’t in the case of Johansen. He recognized that our vision for local food systems was the near equivalent of his own. We share a vision of what local, sustainable food production and consumption should look like. But there are many barriers. It’s hard to get farmers to give up their high yields of corn and soy bean production to grow a diversity of crops—especially vegetables that need to be tended and that aren’t sold to a corporation. The really scary part is how high grain prices are. There are many disincentives for farmers to grow crops for local consumption. We’re still not sure how we can sustain this model, although national trends toward farmer’s markets and sustainable agriculture are encouraging.
How do students get involved?
Augustana has a small vegetable farm and orchard on campus called Augie Acres. Students tend the gardens; dining services uses a good deal of the produce and the students sell the rest in an on-campus farmers market. Much of the student work is through team-taught “learning-community” courses. Since many of our students are from the Chicago sprawl and have never gotten dirty in a garden before coming to college, growing their own food seems like something we ought to be teaching them.
How else does Dining Services contribute to the health of the area?
We do all we can do with recycling and minimizing waste, including a program that provides students with washable “to-go” containers. We use compostable materials and compost locally.
Our most exciting venture is probably working with Wesley Acres to recycle our used fryer oil which they convert to bio-diesel to heat their green houses to extend the growing season and run farm equipment. Last spring, Augustana purchased their own bio-diesel converter and an Alternative Fuels class will help convert our cooking grease to usable fuel. Meanwhile, we’re adding utility vehicles on campus that can use bio-diesel fuel. We hope we can produce 2500–3000 gallons per year at 68 cents per gallon. (Compare that to $4 per gallon for gas!) And so, the very programs that help local growers also help Augustana to be energy independent and help teach our students to be citizens of the local economy, which includes the health of soil and water.
Does Augustana’s Lutheran identity matter to these efforts?
As a Lutheran school and a place where students and staff take many religious traditions seriously, we feel as though being good stewards of the earth has been put in our charge. It is the responsibility of any church or religious organization to understand that resources are limited and that stewardship is our collective calling. Anything we can do to teach that stewardship is well worth it.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
Wilhelm argues that the rhetoric framing ELCA higher education as a binary between “secular” and “religious” is “hokum”: there is a third way of doing higher education from a Christian perspective that is religious in motivation and practice but on the ground looks secular. After more than half a century of debates, he calls on ELCA presidents to “do something” in 2013 to move forward in shared mission and vocation.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Jason A. Mahn
Mahn introduces the issue through Norman Wirzba’s The Paradise of God and the Genesis 2 vocation given to Adam to care for adamah—arguing that “vocation” is the Lutheran name for an incarnational, creation-centric theology of kenosis and that Lutherans bring distinctive theological gifts to environmental work even if no absolutely unique perspective on caring for creation.
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Institutional Focus
Vocation for Life: A Report on a New Initiative for Alumni
A report on “Vocation for Life,” a collaborative initiative of ELCA-related colleges and universities to make vocational exploration available to alumni across the country regardless of which school they attended. The first pilot retreat—“Explore Your Life’s Calling,” in Rochester, Minnesota in November 2011, facilitated by Tom Morgan of Augsburg, Chris Johnson of Gustavus, and Tom Scholtterback of Concordia using the Circles of Trust approach—is described.
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Article
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Ann Pederson
Pederson asks who we are, where we are, and how then we shall live within the Epic of Evolution and the doctrines of creation, incarnation, and imago dei. Drawing on John 3:16 (“For God so loved the cosmos…”), Luther on God’s presence “in the veins of a leaf,” Augustine’s City of God, Phil Hefner’s “created co-creator,” Joseph Sittler’s “Called to Unity,” and Norman Maclean’s Young Men and Fire, she argues for a cosmic reading of incarnation in which all of creation—not only the human—bears the image of God.
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Institutional Focus
Facing Tornados and Climate Change: An Interview with Jim Dontje about Environmental Innovation at Gustavus
Jim Dontje
Dontje, director of the Johnson Center for Environmental Innovation at Gustavus Adolphus College, describes the Center’s work with solar thermal and photovoltaic systems, LEED certification of Beck Hall, recycling and conservation initiatives, the Linnaeus Arboretum, and the difficult work of building consensus around climate response—reflecting on how Gustavus’s 1998 tornado recovery shaped a community capable of collective action, and on how the “Lutheran identity” both restrains and energizes the college’s environmental ethos.
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Article
A Lutheran Ethic of Environmental Stewardship
Jim Martin-Schramm
Martin-Schramm sketches a Lutheran ethic of environmental stewardship organized around four moral norms inherited from World Council of Churches discussions and developed by Presbyterian and ELCA social statements: sustainability, sufficiency, participation, and solidarity. He grounds each norm in scripture and the Lutheran tradition—the theocentric doctrine of creation against rampant anthropocentrism, the incarnation against destructive dualisms, Christ in community against modern individualism, and accountability to God for future generations—arguing that this “ethic of ecological justice” offers a common moral vocabulary for engaging environmental policy debates that would otherwise collapse into cost-benefit analysis.
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Institutional Focus
Putting Principles into Practice: An Interview with Kenneth Foster about Concordia's Sustainability Council
Kenneth Foster
Foster, chair of Concordia College’s President’s Sustainability Council, describes the Council’s formation under President William Craft in 2011 as a re-energization of stalled task-force work, its coordination with grass-roots campus initiatives, and its strategy of moving from principles to practice in stewardship of natural resources at a Lutheran liberal arts college.
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Article
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Cynthia Moe-Lobeda
Moe-Lobeda argues that the vocation of a Lutheran college is to prepare students for Thomas Berry’s “great work”: forging a sustainable relationship between the human species and the planet while diminishing the gap between those who have too much and those who have not enough. She develops a three-fold “moral vision” rooted in Luther’s theology of the cross—seeing what is (climate injustice and environmental racism for what they are), seeing more just and sustainable alternatives, and seeing God’s saving presence at work—and offers it as a distinctive Lutheran contribution to the panhuman and interfaith challenge of our day.
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Article
Sustaining Sustainability
Baird Tipson
Tipson—former Provost of Gettysburg College, President of Wittenberg University, and President of Washington College—reads Romans 12:2 (“be not conformed to this world…”) against Victor Ferrall’s Liberal Arts at the Brink and the contemporary financial reality of small Lutheran colleges. He tells three case-study stories from Washington College’s Center for the Environment and Society—the Chino Farms partnership, the Chesapeake Semester, and the acquisition of the work boat Callinectes—to show how presidents must engage “the world” to secure resources for sustainability work without being conformed to it.
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Institutional Focus
Health Food in the Inner City: An Interview with Brian Noy about Augsburg's Campus Kitchen
Brian Noy
Noy, Director of Campus Kitchen at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, describes the Kitchen’s four-fold program—Food to Share (2,000 meals per month from surplus dining-services food and Campus Cooking Classes), Food to Grow (an 80-plot community garden), Food to Buy (two farmers markets that accept EBT/food stamps), and Food to Know (educational programming)—and the deep history of Augsburg’s service to the immigrant communities of the Cedar Riverside neighborhood, now Somali and Mexican as well as historically Norwegian.
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Article
The Vocation of Intersections on its Twentieth Birthday
Jason A. Mahn, Robert D. Haak, Tom Christenson
No. 43 · Spring 2016
The three editors of Intersections — Bob Haak, Jason Mahn, and Tom Christenson (in spirit, following his death in 2013) — trace the twenty-year vocation of the journal itself: its 1996 birth at Capital University; its coming-of-age years of debate over institutional markers, two-kingdoms theology, and Lutheran identity; the ascendancy of “education for vocation” as the central marker of Lutheran higher education; and its ongoing identity in relation to a changing ELCA and to the broader cultural conversation about purpose, wholeness, and the vocation of higher education.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
No. 30 · Fall 2009
Wilhelm reports on the difficult financial season facing the ELCA churchwide organization — a ten-percent budget reduction announced in November and significant cuts to unrestricted grants for colleges and universities — while affirming that the ELCA’s commitment to the mission of its schools remains strong, including its commitment to engaging the “other,” the theme of this issue.
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Book Review
Paul Dovre, ed.: The Future of Religious Colleges
Baird Tipson
No. 15 · Winter 2002
Tipson, president of Wittenberg University, reviews Paul Dovre’s edited proceedings of the October 2000 Harvard Conference on the Future of Religious Colleges (Eerdmans, 2002), summarizing essays by Douglas Sloan on the failure of the “two-realm theory of truth,” George Marsden on faith-shaped scholarship, DeAne Lagerquist, Father David O’Connell, Mark Noll, Robert Benne, Mark Roche on Notre Dame, Joel Carpenter on neo-Calvinist Kuyperianism, and Mark Schwehn on a Lutheran “college-related church” and the centrality of vocation. Against Benne’s suggestion that only two or three robustly Lutheran colleges can be sustained, Tipson defends a less robust but still authentically Lutheran model embodied at places like Wittenberg, Gettysburg, and Roanoke, arguing for the enlightenment commitment to subjecting all truth claims to rigorous criticism and for hiring Marsden-style faith-shaped scholars rather than counting Lutheran heads.
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Article
Ivory Tower or Holy Mountain? Faith and Academic Freedom
Nicholas Wolterstorff
No. 11 · Spring 2001
Wolterstorff defines infringement of academic freedom as impairing a faculty member’s standing on account of the ideological content of her position, argues that academic freedom (like free speech) is “duly qualified” rather than absolute, and offers eight considerations bearing on religiously based institutions: Weber’s differentiation of Wissenschaft, religious pluralism within a liberal polity, the vitality of American civil society, a decentralized educational system, the “holistic” character of much American religion, the post-Kuhnian collapse of classical foundationalism and of the “generically human” academy, the fact that ideas matter, and the personhood violated by infringement (the desecration of an image of God). He concludes that the private sector offers wider academic freedom than the public, that religious qualifications are not inherently inappropriate (any more than St. John’s Great Books commitment), but that religiously based colleges too often apply them unjustly—arbitrarily, secretly, without recourse—and that the AAUP’s best service is model codes of procedure.
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Article
The State of Civil Discourse on Campus and in Society
Terence S. Morrow
No. 33 · Spring 2011
Morrow examines the troubled state of civil discourse in the United States and on college campuses, drawing on three deep traditions — the liberal arts, Lutheranism, and the Anglo-American legal tradition — to argue that Lutheran colleges can serve students and society by acknowledging the tensions inherent in civil discourse and helping students navigate them, and surveys promising campus programs at St. Thomas, Tufts, Loyola, and Harvard.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Tom Christenson
No. 17 · Summer 2003
Christenson introduces the four essays by participants in the first Lutheran Academy of Scholars as fruit of the “genuine conversation” that emerges when specialists set aside their lecturers’ podiums to speak as human beings, and welcomes the issue’s additional “Intersections first”—a response to a response to a review—continuing the conversation between Baird Tipson and Robert Benne about the paradigm of Lutheran higher education.